Know what sucks? When your parents are gone and you want to know something about the family history that is has also gone with them. If you don’t know it, you won’t know it. If you don’t know it reliably, you’ll never get any more certainty.
One of the more interesting life-facts I learned about my father before he passed was his employment history/chronology. For whatever reason, being able to imagine him doing work-X at age-Y really helped me get some perspective on his years/experience before I came around. This weekend I got the idea to document my own, I guess because I so valued getting to know my dad’s.
In 1993, I got my very first “job,” if you can call it that, working over the Spring Break week at Sea World. It was some kind of work-experience partnership program with local highschools where you’d learn to make a resume, do a (perfunctory, I’m sure) job “interview,” and then get some experience. They bussed us early each morning from the school and back in the evening after our shifts. Everyone pretty much ended up in vending or food-service, and my lot was to cut whole roasted turkeys for turkey sandwiches. I had a little warming oven under my counter which was full with maybe six or eight whole roasted birds – they’d bring me new ones on rolling carts and re-stock me so I really only did three things all day lone: pull a bird, cut the breast meat, lay a portion on bread, and push it down the assembly line. It was so monotonous, and I saw my hands cutting turkeys each night when I drifted off to sleep.
After Sea World, and also in 1993, I got my very fist “longer term” gig working at Subway making sandwiches (seems I had found my passion). In 1994 I did a short stint at Arbys, satisfying the teenage fast-food work requirement we all have. From there I ended up getting a job in a small local accounting firm as a “go-for,” where I did everything from taking out trash to filing papers to washing the coffee pot. That job I sat down at, and was easier.
After leaving the accounting firm (perhaps a story for another time), I worked like two weeks at a local grocery store as a bagboy, but pulling in carts in the Florida heat was not for me, and I very quickly landed one of my favorite jobs ever to replace it: working in a record store at the mall. I would work at that record store, loving almost every minute of it, from 1995 to 1997, when I had to leave as I was shipping-off to university. One more brief summer internship in 1999 at Raytheon would be my last “pre-career” job before I’d land in Silicon Valley from 2000-2018. 2018 we tuned-in, turned-on, and dropped-out for a year, and in 2019 I started the “pre-retirement” SMB CTO role I’m still at today.
So, there ya go kids, you can read that and get a little better idea of what I was doing and when.
Also written on this day...
- underwear lines - 2024
- digging out & digging in - 2010
- a fitting homage - 2009
- like a switch flipped - 2008
- the older, balding set - 2006
- there is not nobody out there can play like metallica - 2005
- you're just chicken - 2004