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My Incredible Career
Aug. 29th, 2005 12:37 pmThe people working here are great. Being a top-floor room with a huge greenhouse-like window, the office was uncomfortably hot today, so the eLearning Project Manager has just come round handing out ice lollies. I don't think the working environment could be any more relaxed unless the office was furnished with beanbags and we were using iMacs.
Every job that I manage to get myself seems to be better than the last. It was easy for that to happen at first - after all, I started out working in Tesco in my sixth year of school. Strangely enough I don't really remember much about that job - three weekdays out of five I would go in there and stand around in the drinks aisle for four hours, occasionally going in to the warehouse at the back and collecting another IRN-BRU or two when the shelf looked a bit empty. Apparently my manager had a reputation for not really knowing what he was doing at all, a quality that he certainly passed on to me. I once rearranged all the mineral water in to alphabetical order just out of sheer boredom.
After my first year at university, I was insistent that I wasn't going back to Tesco again, and applied to as many places as took my interest in the local papers. Only about three of them bothered to reply to me at all, and out of those, the single one that offered me a job was from the Directory Distribution Company. The offer was to deliver phone books to the main road area of Inverurie - in total, about six hundred of them. After going to the distribution centre and back a couple of times because the lorry hadn't arrived yet, the Ford Fiesta was piled high with several rainforests worth of paper, which was unloaded at home and dumped in a difficult to circumnavigate pile in the middle of the hallway. To reduce the mountain, I immediately loaded some into a wheely suitcase and trundled down the road cramming them through people's letterboxes.
The rest of the adventure was recorded in detail, and can be read here. Now that I look at it again, some of that entry is quite awkward, because from some of the entries in those days you'd think that I hadn't yet discovered pronouns. In total, it took me about thirteen hours to get through the lot of them, and £60 isn't totally terrible for that amount of work. It seemed a lot longer, though, because of the awkwardness of having to carry half a ton of paper on me at all times.
For the next summer, I wanted something a bit more permanent. I only applied to a couple of places, but I was quickly asked for an interview at the golf club, which had advertised the position as "waiter". I learned of the inaccuracy of this during the interview, as the kitchen didn't really have separate positions for people, and the jobs were just divided up depending on who had the best ability to deep fry, microwave or serve some of the more perverted customers. (That sentence is a bit unfortunately ambiguous, but I'm sure that my employer wouldn't have minded either way.)
My task in that job was first serving people and keeping the wrapped cutlery full, but I was soon upgraded to Sandwich Maker and then Kitchen Assistant. It was a major improvement on my last two jobs because it involved actual interaction with people and being fed bacon rolls on a regular basis. Actually it's a bit misleading to refer to it in the past tense because I haven't left the job as such - I'm still welcome to phone them up and ask for work whenever I'm around, it's just that I didn't really want to work there this summer in addition to being at the RGU full time.
I didn't have a remotely computer science-related job until this one, unless you count pulling computers apart and putting them back together again at Whitney's dad's office. (I'm only linking to that because I like the entry title.) But with the Internet always available, the opportunity to go in to a site and correct people's grammatical errors, and being regularly plied with doughnuts when they're going cheap at the supermarket, computer science is definitely seeming like the right career to go with at the moment.
My driving licence is three years old today. Apparently this means when I'm 21 I can legally teach people to drive.
Every job that I manage to get myself seems to be better than the last. It was easy for that to happen at first - after all, I started out working in Tesco in my sixth year of school. Strangely enough I don't really remember much about that job - three weekdays out of five I would go in there and stand around in the drinks aisle for four hours, occasionally going in to the warehouse at the back and collecting another IRN-BRU or two when the shelf looked a bit empty. Apparently my manager had a reputation for not really knowing what he was doing at all, a quality that he certainly passed on to me. I once rearranged all the mineral water in to alphabetical order just out of sheer boredom.
After my first year at university, I was insistent that I wasn't going back to Tesco again, and applied to as many places as took my interest in the local papers. Only about three of them bothered to reply to me at all, and out of those, the single one that offered me a job was from the Directory Distribution Company. The offer was to deliver phone books to the main road area of Inverurie - in total, about six hundred of them. After going to the distribution centre and back a couple of times because the lorry hadn't arrived yet, the Ford Fiesta was piled high with several rainforests worth of paper, which was unloaded at home and dumped in a difficult to circumnavigate pile in the middle of the hallway. To reduce the mountain, I immediately loaded some into a wheely suitcase and trundled down the road cramming them through people's letterboxes.
The rest of the adventure was recorded in detail, and can be read here. Now that I look at it again, some of that entry is quite awkward, because from some of the entries in those days you'd think that I hadn't yet discovered pronouns. In total, it took me about thirteen hours to get through the lot of them, and £60 isn't totally terrible for that amount of work. It seemed a lot longer, though, because of the awkwardness of having to carry half a ton of paper on me at all times.
For the next summer, I wanted something a bit more permanent. I only applied to a couple of places, but I was quickly asked for an interview at the golf club, which had advertised the position as "waiter". I learned of the inaccuracy of this during the interview, as the kitchen didn't really have separate positions for people, and the jobs were just divided up depending on who had the best ability to deep fry, microwave or serve some of the more perverted customers. (That sentence is a bit unfortunately ambiguous, but I'm sure that my employer wouldn't have minded either way.)
My task in that job was first serving people and keeping the wrapped cutlery full, but I was soon upgraded to Sandwich Maker and then Kitchen Assistant. It was a major improvement on my last two jobs because it involved actual interaction with people and being fed bacon rolls on a regular basis. Actually it's a bit misleading to refer to it in the past tense because I haven't left the job as such - I'm still welcome to phone them up and ask for work whenever I'm around, it's just that I didn't really want to work there this summer in addition to being at the RGU full time.
I didn't have a remotely computer science-related job until this one, unless you count pulling computers apart and putting them back together again at Whitney's dad's office. (I'm only linking to that because I like the entry title.) But with the Internet always available, the opportunity to go in to a site and correct people's grammatical errors, and being regularly plied with doughnuts when they're going cheap at the supermarket, computer science is definitely seeming like the right career to go with at the moment.
My driving licence is three years old today. Apparently this means when I'm 21 I can legally teach people to drive.
