The Packet Rat

One of the few places there’s still a reference to my long-deceased Government Computer News psuedonymous column “The Packet Rat” is a citation in the Wiktionary for an alternative meaning for “defenestrate”:

(computing, transitive, humorous, slang) To remove a Windowsoperating system from a computer. quotations ▲

• 2001 July 21, “Packet Rat” (pseudonym), “Judge Rat calls for a Microsoft defenestration“, on GCN: Government Computer News:◦ Enable one-click uninstalls of unwanted OS and application features with a Defenestrate icon.

I got my start in tech as a Navy officer in November of 1988 when I was assigned the collateral duties of ADP Security Officer, Deputy Training Officer and Network Administrator at Special Boat Squadron 2 in Little Creek, Virginia. This was because I knew what a PC was, owned one, and had repaired and upgraded it myself. After the Navy, I spent a few years as a network wire puller, trainer, and occasional database administrator–mostly for government customers. Once, I even was forced to use WordPerfect 4.2 as a database by the NLRB, but that’s another story.

Then I went to work at Government Computer News. I was hired as a network administrator and occasional stringer–I had not been hired as a reporter straightaway because my previous editorial employer (a DC computer newspaper called Computer Digest, where I edited a certain SJVN occasionally) had refused to give me a good reference because I had the bad judgement of not regurgitating the press release but actually looking inside the case of computers I reviewed. After handling the conversion of GCN to a digital prepress, I was allowed to become a full time Labs editor. I even got a networking column.

In 1994, I was was offered a job at Information Week as a member of the labs team, working for IWL managing editor Julie Anderson. But my boss at GCN, Susan Menke, wanted to keep my column going in a different format. So she asked me to do a pseudonymous column in the style of the rumor sections that graced the big trade tabloids — eWeek (then PC Week) had Spencer Katt and InfoWorld had Cringely.

So I created The Packet Rat, with the fake byline R. Fink. The Packet Rat was an anthropomorphic rodent working as a senior IT professional at an unnamed government agency who somehow managed to get to all sorts of trade shows and burrow into tech companies’ inner sanctums for scoops. But what the column really became was an absurdist version of thinly-veiled autobiography of family and work life sprinkled with utter fantasy.

The Packet Rat became a mascot at GCN’s booth at federal tech trade shows, and the most read feature in the tabloid. “He” outlasted most of my old colleagues at GCN, running for 15 years. In the end the Rat was forced to retire by a redesign of the publication (and shrinking budgets); ironically, by that time I was back at the company that now owned GCN (1105 Media) as the editor of Defense Systems magazine, and had to do the last few columns before the sendoff for free.

Some of those columns still exist on Route 50, the site that consumed the remains of 1105’s content management system, but they’re so poorly formatted that they’re almost illegible.

I tried continuing the Rat as a blog for a while. I got laid off by 1105 during the financial crisis, and survived off freelance. I briefly took a job with Biznow running federal tech newsletters, but quit quickly when I realized I could do better if I stayed freelance (along with some technical writing and tech consulting gigs on the side). And then I got a call from Ars Technica.

All that time, thepacketrat has been my Twitter handle and username elsewhere. And it all began about 30 years ago today.