112 - Jobs I've Had VII

Well, while I was working at Associated Spring (follow me now, there's a reason I mention this), I bought my first computer, a Commodore VIC-20. My daughter was recently born, and with my wife and I working split shifts (me first, her second), it gave me something to do at night while my daughter slept. Not too long after that, I bought myself a Commodore 64. After using it for a few months, and writing some programs and typing some in from magazines (thousands and thousands of lines of code), I saw an ad in the newspaper for a Commodore 64 class at a local high school. I went to take the class and immediately found out that I already knew what was being taught, and that it was for people much older than me and a lot less fluent with the C-64. I became very good friends with the teacher (my late friend Kevin, (see the March 24th post, 58 Silent Key, N1EPU)). He asked me if I wanted to teach a class as they had turned people away. I taught for one semester and when I came in for the next one, they replaced all the C-64s with IBM PC's. I had to take a class on that, then taught for the next 13 years, in order 'Introduction to DOS, Introduction to Multimate Word Processing, Introduction to Windows 3.1, Introduction to MS Office (Word and Excel), Introduction to Computing' and on and on.

Back to where we were on Monday, where I knew that my days were numbered at Associated Spring. All this work I put into teaching and computers were about to pay off.

My wife had gotten a call from her dad's former boss at The Torrington Company, a broad line manufacturer of Bearings, for a computer job. My wife was working at Aetna Life Insurance at the time, working on mainframe computers. When she saw what the job was about, she told him "Oh, you want my husband Dave, not me.. I do more mainframe work, Dave knows PC's". I got called in for an interview the next week.

I was immediately offered the job, in a whole new career, and I was scared as heck. I also didn't know everything they wanted me to do (network administrator) but they said they'd send me to school for it.

I made the big, very scary decision to change careers in 1990, and never looked back at springs. I went to school, got a certification in Novell Networking, and was the Network Administrator for a 250 user network, plus 5 remote sites (don't forget Calhoun Bubba and Curt).

As Curt and Kent (Bubba) will attest, working for The Torrington Company, was sheer magic. I've never since, nor ever have worked for a place before that I so loved. After putting 11 years of my life into the place, I got laid off about a year before the company got sold.

That's enough for today... I hope you all have a wonderful Wednesday!!