I got an email from a reader. She asked me what I do for work. Well, here you go. My work life in short (kinda).
My formal education ended pretty much with High School. And that, as I am sure you all understand, was not much of an education at all. After I graduated, I went to college off and on for a few years, but quickly found myself becoming bored of the same stuff that was boring me in high school. The education was simply not advanced enough and wasn’t dealing with what I wanted to learn about most. Cool shit.
After 3 mostly bad years of college with only two good semesters included, I dropped out and went to work. I started on the phones as a technical support rep for AOL. You want to talk about boring and annoying? I was there for ten months, then promptly decided that I was going to quit when I was offered a job to work as a software testing engineer for American Express. My career was on track finally. Well, maybe not.
American Express was a fine company to work for. They treated me very well, though the pay was less than spectacular. I happened to be a problem for the company though. I thought I was smarter than I was and started to branch out on my own a bit. What it came down to was that I was lazy. I didn’t get my work done when I was supposed to. I was released from the position after 3 months. It was only a temp position, but it still gave me a bit of a wakeup call.
Just after that, I decided to start my own company. It was a computer services company that was mostly based around the concept of building custom computers for high end users. That was how it started at least. I quickly came to find out that high end users tend to build their own computers, and would much rather not have me doing it for them. After realizing that obvious point, I started to branch out into the home user market and soon into the small business market. It was actually starting to work out rather well when I hit burnout. I had worked harder on this business than I had on anything before in my life. I needed help, but had recruited the wrong people to assist me in the venture and it had caught up to me and killed me. More to the point, it had killed my business. I took some time off while keeping the business running when I met a new business partner of sorts. After knowing him for about a year, we decided to merge our companies and he took over all the business that my company had generated over the 3 years I ran it. I went to work for him as a consultant and accounts manager after the transfer of assets went through. I stayed with this company for about a year off and on but decided to finally quit that position and begin working in a new direction.
I had made a big decision to start moving towards systems administration as a career and hobby. I was starting to play with Linux at the time, and had decided that was the direction I wanted to go with my continuing self education. I started buying books the next day.
During the transition phase when I was ridding myself of the monkey on my back I called business, I started working for Teleperformance USA. I was involved with the MSN project and had taken a position as a phone technician with them. After several months of doing that, I saw an internal job postion about a position opening up in the Philippines. It was a six month to one year position and it sounded like a nice escape to greener pastures. I applied for it and was accepted for the position just a couple weeks later. I had 6 weeks for training and to say goodbye to my family and my girlfriend of 18 months. Needless to say, she was not happy.
Six weeks later, I left for Manila to the tune of much sobbing from the girlfriend and sounds of my voice promising a prompt return. My work experience in Manila is a blur to me now. My time there consisted of working 12-15 hours a day and partying as much as I could. I went on frequent “walkabouts” throughout the city and was even contemplating setting up shop there on a permanent basis as my girlfriend at the time had shown some interest in coming over to be with me there for a while.
By my second month in Manila, I had been promoted because of my hard workand assigned my own team of agents. I had begun looking for a condo or apartment to rent or buy and was considering accepting an offer for a semi permanent position there that had been forwarded to me. It was a five year contract with a great bonus structure associated with it and ample opportunity to fly home to see my family when things were slower.
I was on the verge of accepting the position when some very nasty rumors started to flow about me. Somehow a rumor was started that I was having a sexual relationship with a member of my team. As I was planning to marry the girl I was dating at the time, I can safely say that it was a bunch of horse shit. I denied it time and again and decided finally that if my company was not going to stand up for me in something so simple as that, I was not going to work for them anymore. I walked into the site directors office later that day and told him that I was going to be leaving for a variety of reasons. I will write an article on this portion of things at a later time.
One week later, I was on a plane heading home. It was supposed to be an 18 hour flight, but felt like only a few minutes. I took two sleeping pills and had a Guinness before I left. I had a small amount of time in Japan to get something to eat, so I got a pastrami sandwich on rye (IN JAPAN!) and had another tall Guinness. About 16 hours later, I was in San Francisco and 2 hours later, in Salt Lake City. I remember that it was 92F outside and I was freezing cold because there was no humidity in the air. Bad day.
A few weeks after returning home, I started working for Orbit Irrigation as a Contact Center Trainer and Lead. That position continued for about 3 months until there was a massive restructuring of the sales division of the company.
I promptly went to work on the phones again. It was for a somewhat large company that ran Internet services. This position was short lived though. I got a job offer from the best company I have ever worked for. Konnections is a small ISP that does web hosting as well. They are currently one of the largest ColdFusion web hosts in the world.
I worked for Konnections for nearly 3 years. I started on the phones with them, but it was a whole different type of job than AOL or MSN. It was more geared toward systems administration and hardcore troubleshooting which made it an instant hit in my book.
After about 6 months of working on the phones for them, I was promoted to the position of System Administrator. I had begun working towards that years earlier and had finally obtained my goal. Konnections was moving their headquarters to Dallas, TX, and offered me a position down there. I moved about a month later. When I got down there, my learning started. I started working in a datacenter on a frequent basis and was the lead Linux admin for the company. Good times!
After 2 years down there, I moved back to Utah for various personal reasons. I began working for an aircraft manufacturing company two days after I got home. I was hired to be the Director of Information Technology. I worked there for 3 months and was offered a position with my current company as a writer.
My job is to take consumer security software products and rate them according to a set of conditions that are determined based on the products that I am testing.It isn’t quite so romantic as it sounds.
The real question is this: How did I get to this place? I am an administrator that is writing for a living. Who knew huh? So there you go. You know what I do and how I did it. There will of course be more information as I get the story finished, but until then, this should help.
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