Over my lifetime I have had many ideas about my career. (I may have posted a blog entry about this in the past but I don’t remember) I can’t quite recall what was my first career idea it was either a cartoonist or meteorologist. I loved cartoons and was also into the weather. I think for a brief period being an astronomer was my career path.
Then I took up baseball and from about the age of 11 to 17 I thought professional baseball was going to be my thing. It was foolish to not think of any other vocation since the odds of being a pro athlete are so slim but that was my plan. When that fell apart I bounced around wildly in my job path.
The first time I went to college it was for a computer science major. I was leaning towards being some sort of programmer. However I dropped out after 3 months. The second time I went to college it was as an education major. I had ideas of being a teacher of some sort. That idea was misguided and I think the reason I even considered it had more to do with wanting to relive my high school days than wanting to teach. I would have made a terrible teacher. I dropped out of school this time after about a month.
I went through a hard period of just doing shitty jobs for little money and not really knowing what I wanted to do. I cut firewood for 3 months for 20-40 bucks a day. It was the hardest money I ever worked for. Each day I would be exhausted.
After my lumberjack stint I landed a job at Weis markets in the meat department. I started off as a chicken cutter making around 5 bucks an hour. After 3 years there I had been elevated to a full scale meat cutter making maybe $6.50 an hour. That job was a total drag. Imagine working in a room that is 50 some degrees all the time and that has permanent scuz on the floor from various meat products falling on it. Every day I came home smelling of meat. My boots were covered in dried meat particles.
Not to mention the job was very dangerous. Working with knives and saws all day is hairy stuff. I met more than one fellow meat cutter missing parts of fingers. I actually did have some fun there interacting with my co-workers there. The produce manager and I would often have strength competitions where we would see who could press a 40 pound bag of potatoes over their head the most times.
There was a lot of romance going on at Weis for me. I had some action going on with several women and met my first wife there as well. However I realized there was no long term future in meat cutting and continued my search for a meaningful vocation.
I applied out of the blue for a job selling cars at Savage Hyundai. I had no sales experience but they didn’t care. They wanted someone they could teach to sell the way they wanted anyway. I was blown away that I got hired. How cool, I get to wear nice clothes that don’t smell like meat, have my own desk and even get to drive a dealer demo car around! What a life!
The job was crazy. The sales force we had was fillled with all sorts of interesting personalities, probably the most interesting bunch I ever worked with. The excitement of making a sale was unlike anything I had done up to that point in my career. Like most beginner’s I had some good luck at first and sold a decent amount of cars. However over time, the job became incredibly stressful. The job was basically all commission. If you sold nothing in a week, you were paid $75 BEFORE taxes. Car sales is very hot/cold. During a weekday you could be sitting there staring out the window all day with no customers. If one did show up you had to approach them immediately and apply the pressure without trying to seem like you were applying pressure, a difficult thing. On a Saturday it was a crazy zoo, if you had time to stop and eat at all, you would inhale it without chewing and get right back on the sales floor, you didn’t want to miss an “up”.
I was taught all sorts of tricks to manipulate people towards buying a car. Some of the games that were played were very humourous. If someone called on the phone asking for a price on a used car in the paper we were told to bang on our desks and make noise so it sounded like we were in the garage. Then we would say “I’m sorry I am in the shop, can I have your name and number and I will call you right back when I get to the showroom where I have the information” Bang, we had your name and number and you just got on our “Prospect list” which meant you would be getting regular calls from me until you bought a car somewhere. It worked 90% of the time.
Some of the dead time would be spent making calls to people selling vehicles in the paper, figuring they were looking to buy as well. It all just got to be a real drag. At the end of my 13 month span in car sales I was on the verge of a breakdown. I thought I hit the big time when I bagged car sales and snagged a job doing inside sales at Donnelly Directory.
The Donnelly Directory was tring to take a bite out of the yellow pages business. My job was to cold call businesses, trying to convince them that it was important to advertise in both directories. They wanted us to do all this prep work before each call. They told us to look up information about the business we were calling so we could plug this information into the script we were working off of. We were to look up the businesses competitors and see if they advertised in our book and if they did point it out. We were supposed to have an A, B and C pitch for advertising ranging from pricey to cheap., start high, work low. This prep work easily took a half hour per business you were calling. The kicker was after all this prep you would get to “Hi this is Shawn from the Donnelly Directory……” and hear the CLICK. All that work to get hung up on. It drove me mad. The place sucked and I quit after 3 months with nothing else lined up, I just had had it.
At this point was very lost in what I wanted to do. Meat cutting, wood cutting, and sales were OUT. For a few months I did work for my dad around his place. I painted, mowed grass and did other odd jobs. I felt like a loser having to resort to having Dad employ me in my early 20’s.
I finally came up with a plan. I decided to again pursue the computer field. I always had a love for computer/video games so it made sense for me to make a career out of it. I enrolled in Licoln Tech in Allentown for their night time computer technician course. I also landed another horrible job for the day time hours working for Goodwill Indutries.
Goodwill was just a a disgusting job. I started out as a truck helper, meaning I rode around with a driver from store to store and dropped off stuff for them to sell and picked up the donations that were dropped off at the store. The first driver I got paired up with, Randy was a big fat guy that had incredible stink which was a combination of BO and ass. I literally had to breath through my mouth whenever I was in the cab with him. The guy was big, fat and slow, meaning I got to do the lion share of the work. After unloading the “good” stuff we would pull up to the piles of donations which was mostly garbage, and throw them in the truck, once they were thrown in the truck they had to be thrown again to the front of the truck and stacked somewhat. There were many times where the truck by the end of the day was packed from floor to ceiling, front to back with bags, furniture, toys and whatever other assorted junk people left.
After getting back to the plant we had to unload all the junk. Right by the dock doors they had a huge trash compactor which was there for good reason, most of the stuff that was taken in was thrown out. It was amazing what people would “donate”, broken tv’s , dirty underwear, sofa’s that reeked of cat piss, you name it we saw it. It was staggering how many people used Goodwill as a glorified trash collector.
As time progressed I advanced to a floater meaning at times I would also drive the trucks. I never had any truck driving experience but I did surprisngly well adapting to driving a 26 foot straight body truck. I never had an accident. Luckily after I got promoted I didn’t have to go out with Randy much. I heard that Randy was later killed at a railroad crossing.
All the time I was working this shitty Goodwill job I was going to school 3 nights a week. It was a long year. I would get up and go to the gym at 6am, get to work at 7:30 am and then drive to Allentown and not get home until 11:30 or so. I was tired all the time. It was during this grueling year that I had my last accident. I was dozing off as I went around a corner in my Integra. I was going too fast and lost control, spinning out and in the process hitting the front end on an embankment that left my bumper just barely holding on.
I graduated but had no job lined up so I kept trudging along at Goodwill until my big break came. I had put in a resume with Entre computers about a month prior to getting a call for an interview. When I had the interview they told me that they had over 100 applicants for the job, an entry level position integrating computers. However they had several other Lincoln Tech grads on staff and were pleased with them so that was going in my favor. A few days later I got the call that I was hired, I was thrilled.
Entre was a small but very fast growing company. Very few people made very good money but everyone worked very hard. I started out at a measly 16k a year, salaried. I was totally green to the pc environment, I had a Commodore Amiga at home that I knew inside out but PC’s were a foreign language to me. Luckily the poeple that helped me out in the beginning were patient, one of whom was Keener. Keener 
was a young gun there that had responsibility that far outpaced his salary. Looking back it was outrageous what he was paid for what he did. However he took the time to help me with the ropes. There is a moment that I will never forget when I was installing Lotus 2.4 (for dos) on a new pc and it came to the prompt where it tells you to insert the next disk and hit enter to continue. I asked Keener if it was ok to hit enter, which he chuckled while he said yes, amused by my inexperience. I quickly found out that what I learned at Lincoln Tech was basically worthless in my job. If I used 1% of what we learned at school that was optimistic.
Keener was one of several guys I worked with that were from a similar mold, all younger guys in their early to mid-20’s that were busting their ass for little pay for no other reason than they wanted to do a good job. It was really an interesting mix of people that made working there a lot of fun even though the pay was little more than McDonald’s wages.
I did all sorts of odd jobs in the beginning. I was responsible for company van maintenance. I had to check the oil every week, verify the travel logs were being filled out and take them to the carwash if they were dirty. I was also the shipping guy who checked in and shipped out everything. I put together furniture, took down light fixtures and handled just about any shitty job that had to be done. Oddly enough, I still felt good about where I was going. I enjoyed working on computers.
Eventually I was recognized as having some ability and started getting promoted. They hired people under me to do the grunt work and I got to do just new system integration. I did a good job there and got moved to the tech position where I would be going on site to fix pc’s and printers. It was interesting. I got to meet lots of people, be exposed to lots of situations and had a chance to build my confidence as I would triumph over various technical obstacles that were thrown up at me each day.
Through a combination of people leaving and my skills increasing, I eventually got promoted to lead tech. As lead tech I was given the responsibility of handling the hard issues, ironing out customers that were dissatisfied and providing support for the other techs. It was a role I really enjoyed. I knew I found a career at that point.
Arouind this time period is when my first marriage hit the rocks. Well techincally it was on the rocks before it began but that is another story. I would be going out 2 or 3 times a week to O’Kelley’s and drinking, heavy. I would go with a few of my co-workers/friends that also had some problems of their own. We found comfort in each other’s misery. There were some crazy conversations that went on. I was new to alcohol use, only starting when I was 24 years old. I made up for lost time.
The company did what most small growing companies do, get bought out. First they were purchased by Ameridata, a national hodge podge of tech companies. It was pitched to us as something positive with better benefits, more resources, blah blah blah but it was the beginning of the end.
During the Ameridata period I eventually moved up the ladder to being a network tech. Network tech’s billed at a higher rate than hardware techs, thus they generated more income and were paid more. Moving into networking allowed me to break the magical 30k a year salary mark, what I deemed to be a small fortune at that point, wahoo!!
Somewhere around that point the company was sold once again, this time to GE Capital. Again it was pitched as a great thing. Imagine having the power of a worldwide company like GE behind you. What a bunch of BS. All GE did was make our jobs miserable. We lost the power to make decisions ourselves, we could not react without getting approvals up the corporate ladder. By that time Keener had jumped ship years ago and most of of the core group that I came in with and were so fond of had already jumped ship, sick of the bullshit in one area or another. I stuck it out out to the very end before I left to move here. By the time I left I had spent the last few years as rented, dedicated on site support staff, first I served as the network admin for the local Bayer plant and then I went to Sovereign Bank as one of the network admins. Gone were the days where each day had fresh faces, different locations and loads of diversity.
The time at Sovereign was more play than work. Our group did as much screwing off as working. It was fun but at the same time it almost felt dishonest taking money for acting like monkeys all day. Well anyway that takes me to present day which has been documented to death over the last 3 years of this blog’s existence. My current job is steady, well paying and most days, boring. I’ve traded excitement and diversity for stability, money, a pension and control. Most days it seems like a good deal, some it doesn’t.
Our neighbors are out of town for a few days and we are dog sitting their little Jack Russel, Zoe. She is very hyper in comparison to Nicki but very cute. She slept with us last night in bed, under the covers, smashed up against my side. Her and Nicki get along great, it’s very funny watching the little pooch chase huge Nicki (in comparison) around the house. Zoe shares Nicki’s disdain for cats and chases ours whenever the opportunity arises. I do nothing to discourage this behavior.
I went back to the orthodontist again today. While I was there I asked him if we could remove the metal bar retainer that is glued to my bottom teeth and just use the plastic retainer I wear at night. He said he was hesitant to do so because so many people aren’t good about wearing their retainer. I told him with the money I spent, there was no way I would not wear my retainer. I pointed out how the wire made it virtually impossible to floss my front teeth which is going to result in problems sooner or later. So he said they could remove it and cast me for a new plastic retainer.
The removal process was uncomfortable. First the woman used a tool to pry the wire out of the glue. At times it felt like my teeth would break free before the wire would. Then the grinding tool came out to remove the globs of glue. I just am not a fan of having power tools in my mouth.
Finally all the fun was done, they cast me for the new retainer and I went to the front desk to set my next appointment. The lady behind the desk tells me there will be 100 dollar charge for the lower retainer. Huh?, I said, looking bewildered. I told her I had a new cast done for a new retainer but did not know I was being charged extra for it. She excused herself and brought the orthodontist out. He stood there for a few seconds just staring at me with a silly look on his face. I broke the silence by saying in a somewhat annoyed voice, “WHAT?” He said that I requested that he remove the metal retainer and make a new plastic one so they have to charge me for it. I told him that nobody mentioned anything about additional charges for it, that was why I asked. He switched gears and made a joke about not telling the girls at the front desk about stuff so they can take the heat. I pursused it further and got a clarification. I asked if I would need another retainer in the future because one broke or something, I would be charged for it? Yes. Off he went to back to work. The lady behind the desk could tell I was annoyed. I didn’t pay for the retainer yet because it won’t be ready till Monday. I guess I am off base for assuming that dropping eleven grand for Ali and I to get braces would entitle us to lifetime free retainers. No consideration is given for the fact that my treatment plan has gone about double the length I was told it would. Not to mention the fact that really, the orthodontist screwed up by putting a metal retainer in and then realizing I needed a full plastic retainer to keep teeth further back in place. I really am sick of this place. I am hesitant about going nuts on them about it because I am not done with my top teeth so I have to rely on them for awhile yet. I think after I am done, they will be getting a letter about my experience with them.
