Lost at 22

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Flack's entry in the music thread had this element:

"I'm lost at 22, and I've got no fucking clue, and I don't know if things will work out right." I was 22 when I first heard this while working at Best Buy, and wondering myself if my own life was heading in the right direction. "

At 22, I'd have been working at the mall. I don't know if I had community college classes - maybe? But I was there a year and a half. Directionless.

Something caused me to reach out to a temp agency to get what ended up being the full time job at Xerox. I could have done that and just not worked at the mall. I wonder if I took the part time job because I was pretending to be a college student and needed the flexible schedule.

Hmmmm. Thanks for sharing that snippet, Flack. I've been thinking about that time a lot.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Please let me throw some old computing-at-work stories here?

My first real computer job was at Xerox, I was there less than 18 months and I left in August of 1998, so it would have been 1996 somewhere when I started. We had bugs written on a piece of paper and placed in a drawer. There was a stack of empty bug forms we had. No tracking, no Bugzilla . We didn't really have bug meetings either and now it occurs to me I can't recall how a bug made it to a dev to fix. I guess we handed them the paper? We did have release versions (we made printer driver software) so that was a concept that was there.

One of my biggest memories was also getting in my truck for lunch. Leaving, finding a new pizza place in and about Webster, NY, and ordering a slice and eating it in the vehicle. Rochester has stretches of beautiful springs and falls where the weather is perfect for me, and eating some PIE, and listening to Jim Rome are some of my pleasant memories.

[pinback]

RACK 'IM!

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

JIM CAN I GET A

DRUG TEST

ON COMPUTERIZED BUG DATABASES???

[Flack]

Well I'm sure I've told this story before... after working at half a dozen different restaurants I decided I was done with the food industry. I spent the summer of '94 working for Pizza Hut juggling multiple positions; depending on their needs I would run the cutting table, deliver pizzas, or act as a shift manager. Out of all those positions, delivering pizzas was the most fun. I spent half my shift or more driving around in my car listening to music. I think minimum wage back then here was $4.25/hour and I was making $4.35, plus tips. I'd earn $20-$40 in tips each day depending on the shift, eat free pizza, party with my friends each night after work and sleep until noon. Life was pretty good.

The store's manager began pushing me to become a full-time shift supervisor, which did not come with a raise, earned no tips, and put me in charge of five to ten asshole teenagers every night. I got sick of it pretty quickly and began looking for another place to work. I didn't know anything about programming or building computers but wanted to work with computers so I applied at Best Buy. I figured selling computers had to be better than selling pizza. I filled out a resume, dropped it off, and got called in for an interview.

My interview was scheduled at 6pm with the head of the computer department. I sat down at a table near customer service and the manager, Tracy, came up to talk to me. We had just started the interview when the computer department paged him. He told me to wait there and that he would be right back. I think I sat there for about 45 minutes alone, just staring at the floor and walls. Someone finally walked over to ask me if I had been helped and when I explained the situation, they paged Tracy who immediately returned, apologized for forgetting about me, and offered me a job on the spot.

I worked at Best Buy for 8 months, from August 1994 through April 1995. During those eight months I worked in three different departments: computers, software, and the tech booth. The computer department was the most work. In software all I did was restock shelves, straighten boxes, and answer simple questions. The tech booth (which later became Geek Squad) was the most fun and most challenging. We would install hard drives and repair computers and spent most of our time doing nothing.

I think Best Buy paid $6/hour, which seemed pretty good. In the spring of 1995, my buddy Jeff informed me that the help desk he worked at was hiring. The job might only last a few months, but the starting pay was $10/hour, and that was enough to get me to leave Best Buy. After two rounds of interviews, I was hired as a contractor at an FAA help desk and offered $12/hour, which might as well have been a zillion dollars back then. I was under the impression that the job would only last a few months and so far it's been 27 years.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yeah, the pay thing was crazy, it's insane how little these companies moved the amount per hour and the difference it made in our lives.

I remember trying to help people at Electronics Boutique (where I worked before Xerox) get their games going. I was on a computer every day of my life and I was in 386 / memory manager / autoexec.bat hell, I did it all the time, of course I could help people. I had the sense that such knowledge at a job is what "did it" for the people that hired me on a contract at Xerox.

I was working two jobs, EB and Xerox for a bit. The story I told myself about EB is how it was a terrible job and it was way more dramatic than it needed to be. Gamestop bought them and from what I read, it's like EB's policies took over and they kept the GameStop name. However, there's all this "quota" shit that I don't remember us having. I think there was a stretch where I wasn't dating anyone and had some days where I worked my 9-5 at Xerox and then did some nights and/or weekends at EB. I did that a while for the money. One other time I've worked two jobs at once, when I had a job a few years ago and was trying to do some nights and weekends (yet, with deadlines) for a startup. Having done it twice, I dislike it.

[Flack]

I remember working at Mazzio's back when minimum wage was $3.35/hour. I remember having my first review and the boss telling me he tried to get me a dime-per-hour raise but was only able to get me a nickel. Maybe next time, kid. It blows my mind that 7-11 is hiring at $15/hour -- then again, I went to Taco Bell for lunch and a combo number 2 with a large iced-tea is $9.80.

When I worked in the Best Buy tech booth people would drag their PC's tower into Best Buy along with some game they bought and ask us to install it. If we didn't have to do anything to install it we charged $29.95 and if we had to mess with their config.sys and autoexec.bat it was $49.95. Imagine paying $50 for Sim City and then paying another $50 for some smart ass kid to install it for you. For what it's worth I rarely charged people anything. One time this lady brought a computer in and said her father died and his will was on the computer and had put a CMOS password on the computer. I did the ol' jumper-switch to reset the BIOS and got it working and then told the lady to tell the people up front I couldn't do it so she didn't get charged for it. I was always better at computers than I was at business.

Best Buy used to get two truck deliveries a week, so if you wanted extra hours they always needed people for that. If you were lucky you ended up in a department stacking and unstacking boxes. If you were unlucky, you ended up with a dolly, rolling stacks of stuff out of a hot trailer to the correct department.

When I got the job at the help desk I didn't have the heart to tell Best Buy I was quitting, so I asked them to keep me on as part time and I would come back and work a few shifts. I didn't work there for two weeks and someone called me and said if I didn't work at least one day, they were letting me go. So they ended up putting me back on the schedule to come work the truck. I had just spent the past two weeks at my new job sitting behind a desk playing on a computer all day, and went back to rolling a dolly around in the heat. I did it one time and said nope, I'm out.

I made so many friends at Best Buy and have such good memories of working there. I was sure I would be friends with those guys for the rest of my life. I got married four months after I quit working there and I think only two of them came to the wedding. I am FB friends with one person from BB.

[Jizaboz]

Wow man! Getting paid to just mess increase files= etc in DOS configs to make a game run! That would have been my dream job at 15 rather than the job I did have.. washing pots and pans in between smoking Marlboros for 5$ an hour "under the table".

At 22, I was working at JournalNow.com for 10$ an hour as a "website producer" and man did I think I had it made for about a year due to my previous job being mixing and delivering car paint in Greensboro. I had 56k at home but this place had 2 T1 lines.. one incoming and one outgoing. It was so fast back then and I spent a lot of time reading text files, researching NES ROM hacking, and building my own website on the side as I kept up with my duties. The main duty was taking raw text with no formatting from "ATEX" terminal server dumps and converting them into html pages. Then, for the images I would go over to the image department and get a Zip drive full of the current high-res images from the next days Winston-Salem Journal so that I could FTP em and throw them into the image tags.

The chick that trained me was cool and we talked a lot. I recall my ex wife (fiancé at the time) asking if she was pretty and I said no. Later she ran into her for the first time at some hipster eatery or something and was like "you said she wasn't pretty". Again, I told her I didn't find her attractive at all. I LIED. hahahaha!! The Ex's mom was whom had given me the lead on the job, after all and I didn't wanna fuck that up. It was a unique time. For once I was driving into "downtown" of what used to be one of our biggest cities, right near our prototype of sorts of the NY State Building which was built before the actual building in NW. I'd come a long damn way from washing pots and pans, Arby's, bagging groceries at Kroger, Burger King, Biscuitville, a week at Cracker Barrel, half a year before quit picture framing factory, etc.

Eating lunch at Elizbeth's Pizza nearby on New Years Eve was a highlight. I remember being bummed about having to work New Years Eve in fucking 1999 so I tried to make the best of it. This was and still is a great New York and Neapolitan style pizza joint, so I was stoked they were open. I ordered a medium anchovy and spinach NY style pizza (I'm here alone at like 9:30 pm so why not) and a Budweiser draft. Half-way through the pizza, I ask for a 2nd beer oand the waiter was reluctant like "you sure you OK?" probably because I'd inhaled half this pizza and a beer in like 5-10 minutes. Ate the all but 1 slice. Asked for another beer. Dude is like "OK we usually do two but.." as he realizes it's New Years Eve and I assure him I'm fine he brings me the 3rd beer. Paid the bill and went back to the office in one of the oldest parts of the building. Sat at my chair, and passed the fuuuck out.

A bit later that night, there is a tall dude I can barely see behind a flashlight saying "Hey! You OK?" Look up, it was the security guard! Cool as hell older black dude. Me and him talked for what seemed like forever while I sobered and woke up a bit. Realized it was after midnight. Totally missed the NY rollover lol. Went outside and smoked a cigarette.. came back in and got the nights work done and went home at 2:00am to drink more beer. While this night of Gonzo web production went smooth as well as many other nights, about a year after getting this job they converted to a new production system they called "Open Pages" which still required import of older data and that shit was a fucking mess. I had no proper training and the first night they expect me to sort all of that shit out I threw up my hands at about 4:00am after calling a couple of co-worker. But I didn't call main boss lady despite it being 4:30 so I got reprimanded for that rather than anyone answering to why tf was I not trained on this data import procedure or even given time to explore it for myself?

So after meeting with the boss lady, I don't seem to be fired so I keep coming to the newly built office that shares room with FOX 8 News. I'm one of those nerds that can be seen in the background on a computer! Neat! That's when things got weird. These people apparently don't believe in being upfront with co-workers even way back then. For at least another week I'd show up, sit at a computer and try to set up a few tools to get my job done. Ask questions and get no answers. Realized I didn't have some software installed to get my job done and complained. No answer. Then, I notice a job listing for MY JOB. So, I go to the lady over my direct boss and ask about that. Her last name was "Fox" but I can't remember much else. After she explained "Well.. yeah so.. they are looking for someone more journalism oriented" she the said "I can offer you a job as my personal secretary for your same pay.. 10$ an hour" and I felt awful. Said "No, I'd rather be working with computers more and I know the tech dept is full" (I knew this because I was friends with Phil who basically ran it and gave me a shit ton of O'Reily Unix programming books he had bought but never used when he found out I was leaving). And that was that. Mrs Fox told me fill out my timesheet for 2 weeks I won't be working and just go on home.

For at least the next 5 years of my life, I would rarely touch a computer again for work. Instead I went to a temp agency and other random companies where I loaded trucks, worked demolition/cleanup jobs on construction sites, worked demolition/cleanup jobs in protective gear for mold/flood damage (got certified and wanted to move up in that field to homicide/suicide cleanup but most restoration companies expect 80 hour work weeks of anyone in their 20s), worked for the city collecting yard waste from a garbage truck, worked in an injection molding factory, and probably more hard jobs I've conveniently forgotten. During all this time I would come home, drink beer and smoke while I worked on my own "dream projects" such as the later Id Software engine stuff I did. Always kept up with modern linux and networking tech while hacking in whatever language was hot at the time; for a long time for me it was c++.

Mid 2000s I had a job with a coffee vending machine company that let me leave the chaos of just working whatever I can get. Hired for computer work but surprise got sucked into TONS more than that. It wasn't until about 2008 that I was confidently able to say I have a "career" in "computers" when I got hired from a company out of California through a friend with the proposition: "We need a Linux guy."