by Chris Redmond
     
     Jeff Voskamp doesn't spend much time on small-talk
with co-workers when he comes in each morning. He has no
traffic congestion to face, either.
     After all, he starts at four o'clock in the morning,
when only the UW police and maybe a snowplow operator are
around. "It's pretty much lonely," he says.
     But the hours - 4 a.m. to noon - suit him just fine,
and most of his work can be done as easily then as later in
the day. As a Unix software specialist in the Math Faculty
Computing Facility, he's dealing with programs, computers
and networks that are in operation 24 hours a day.
     Only on Wednesdays, when MFCF has a regular afternoon
software meeting, does he stick around for most of the
conventional working day.
     Why the early morning schedule, which Voskamp has been
following since Thanksgiving? Personal convenience, really.
His wife, Sharon, works for a Kitchener vending machine
company with four-to-noon working hours, and he decided it
would be most pleasant to synchronize his life with hers,
"rather than having two completely separate schedules and
never seeing each other".
     In fact there are just two big problems with his
hours. One is parking: "officially, you can't park anywhere
on campus between 3 and 6 in the morning." He lives close
to campus and often walks to work anyway, and when he does
drive, he says he's able to park in a corner of X lot,
north of Columbia Street, and nobody seems to mind.
     The other problem, of course, is scheduling some
sleep. "You try to go to bed about seven thirty or eight
o'clock at night," he says, but that does interfere with
social life.
     Much of that out-of-work life centres on the Kitchener-
Waterloo Little Theatre, where Voskamp has been involved
for two years. He's currently building manager - KWLT owns
an old building on Princess Street in downtown Waterloo,
and Voskamp has been keeping busy organizing maintenance to
keep the fire marshal's office happy - and also acts as
technical director for "smaller" plays. That involves
expertise with stage lighting and the other mechanics of
making a director and actor look good to the audience.
     He also frequently handles the lighting for Theatre on
the Edge, the local group that used to be called
TheatreSports. Its genre is extemporization, usually
comedy, and if it's tough for an actor to make up the scene
as things go along, it's not so easy for the technical
director either. "You try and improvise along with the
group," Voskamp says. "You never know when the people on
stage want to end the scene!"
     Is he an actor too? Well, no. "The last time I was on
stage," he says, "was when I proposed to my wife in a
TheatreSports game."
     What?
     The lovers had met through TheatreSports, and Voskamp
suggested that they make the engagement official on stage.
"She just about fell over laughing when I mentioned it," he
recalls, but she was willing to go along. So they arranged
to wind up together in a "freeze!" scene at the end of a
TheatreSports performance, and he would pull the diamond
ring out of his pocket and make the proposal official.
     "I pulled out the ring case and asked her whether she
would marry me," he recalls, "and then somebody who wasn't
in on it yelled 'Freeze!'" They had to finish the scene a
few minutes later - and even then some members of the
audience wouldn't believe the engagement was real.
     He has no plans to tread the boards again soon, but
KWLT audiences can see his technical work this weekend as
he does lighting for a one-act play weekend at the Princess
Street site.
     Back on campus, Voskamp spends the day, or rather
night, in a windowless office in the Math and Computer
building.
     He denies the stereotype of a computer geek surrounded
by half a dozen keyboards and computers. "Actually I just
have one machine," he insists.
     He is responsible for a software package called
"xhier", developed at Waterloo some years ago to automate
the distribution of other software across nearly 600 Unix
computers all over campus. There are at least 14 major
combinations of hardware types and operating systems, he
says, which makes the use of an automated device like xhier
essential for "pushing" software updates onto all the
machines that need them. He also does other software
maintenance.
     Voskamp's background for his job, he claims, involves
"poking around on the system" while he was an applied math
and computer science undergraduate. He earned his BMath in
1988
     "I haven't used applied math once since I graduated,"
he claims, but his computer science background got him a
series of jobs at small technical companies in Waterloo,
most recently Focus Automation Systems. He came to UW in
July 1994.