My Wacky Work History

I was 14, it was my first job. I spent a summer washing, stacking and sorting dishes for an absolutely disgusting local restaurant. Thank god it was only a summer job. This turned me off from food serivce forever more.

The next summer I did an internship with a local software company. What I didn't realize was that it was just me and the boss... and the boss was a pretty big failure. He'd stumble in whenever, leave early and generally didn't give me much direction. So I pretty much had to pretty much run things. This included dealing with customers and support calls for a program I was never trained on. Miserable job, but a great learning experience.

Yes, I worked for The Great Satan. I sold credit cards to unsuspecting people just sitting down to dinner. I was very good at the job, but it was zero fun. The only benefit was that the pay was fantastic for a part-time job ($12/hr in 1999) and they fed us all the pizza we could eat.

Next summer, it was off to the farm. I worked as a general farm-hand at the University's research horticulture farm. I did everything from help plant, weed, water and pick a 7 acre field of tomatoes, to watering stands of apple trees. Some days I tagged branches or counted buds. Other days I spent in a greenhouse transplanting things, or in the lab staring at petri dishes. Not mentally challenging, but by-god was I in great shape by the end of that summer. And I had a fantastic tan!

I ended up running the student computer lab for the College of Ag for two years in college. This meant I did everything from basic maintenance, installations, hardware replacement, to classroom instruction. Yeah, I even got to teach college classes... too bad the pay didn't match.

It was cool, the lab was my domain, I had 30 desktop PCs, 30 PC laptops and 30 Macs to toy with. I also had a staff of 8 other lab attendants under me.

The last two years of college I was the single IT guy for the entire Biochem department. Servers, desktop support, network troubleshooting, everything came down to me. It was the first job where I had purchasing power and was generally respected as the resident expert in a conversation. I learned more in this job than any other.

After college I landed a full-time gig at an insurance company where I spent some time in the IT project management group before finally settling in the network security products group. I got to implement and support multi-million dollar security systems. I learned a lot here about working in a large corporate environment... and how much I hated it. Put in two years and moved on.

Yes, that's actually my job title now... for a brief period it was "Internet Evangelist" Basically what it means is I run my company's websites and communities. If it's not coding, I'm to a large extent in charge of it. This means I write daily content for our sites, manage user issues, and manage new site projects. It's a lot of work, but it's extremely cool. Every day is a new challenge.