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A little about the computer geek in me -
I
actually started out 20 years ago with an extreme hatred for computers
or anything automated. I felt it was ruining people and making them soft
and lazy. All this began to turn around when my Sister gave me a Commodore
64 she no longer wanted. I became curios how the box worked, and before
long was writing programs in Commodore basic. Later I bought a used IBM
80806 (XT). I worked at McDonnell Douglas at the time and it wasn't long
before I had written a program top down to automate the ordering process
in our department. This program was later ported and modified for thier
AS400 computers and the forms for it were based on my original little program.
.
As
fate would have it during the McDonnell layoffs in the late 1980s I volunteered
for layoff to start my own business. I bought a packard bell to manage
this business with. Three failed Packard Bells later I had learned a great
deal about the hardware and operationg system. I volunteered at a local
Chinese PC shop simply to learn and several months later was hired by the
midwest's largerst PC distributor to work on their assembly bench. In six
months time I was promoted to service and support and took care of all
the customer support as well as RMA (broken system) repair. I remained
in this position for a number of years (which also included maintaining
the branch's servers and workstations). As always it came time to move
up and on.
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After
a few rough starts with a few less than respectable shops and firms I managed
to hire on at Monsanto. I worked in the IT department and handled workstation
setup and service along with troubleshoooting on the bench. To my good
forturne my then supervisor was a backstabbing credit-stealing jerk. I
quickly grew tired of this, left there, and luckily hooked up with the
well respected consulting firm Bundy and Associates. Mike, the owner, was
probably one of the best people to work for. He could look past my quirks
to see what I was capable of. I handled everything from system and network
steups and support to standalone and server software installs, and of course
anything hardware related. Mike and the others were primarily programming
and the rest fell to me. At one time I had more than 11 servers of different
sizes and types, serial and network communications support, and hundreds
of workstations and printers in my charge. In other words, if it wasn't
coding, it was mine.
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In
the fall of 1999 and early winter of 2000 I developed heart problems that
were partially brought on and defiinitely aggravated by stress which my
profession notorious for. The effects of my condition made it necessary
to abandon full time and go into semi-retirement. I still did contract
work for Bundy for a while, and in the last several years I have done work
for a Saint Louis based hosting company whenever I am needed. My experiences
have given me insight into how the industry works. The position I am in
now allows me to finally ignore the business practice of maiximizing profits
and allows me to work one on one with people and provide the tools, training,
and services to keep them from becoming victims of the industry.
What the PC store and Micrsoft don't tell you CAN hurt you, and cost more
money than it needs to. |
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