It’s that time of the month again, the blog party, woohoo! This time Kenneth Fisher (b | t) has invited us to blog about our first tech job. Oh boy, oh boy, has anybody heard any of my horrible job stories. Well, they started early and with my very first job. But it is a real winner {sarcasm} of a job and company starting my career ripe old age of 19. We might talk about all three jobs I had there. This isn’t a fun read but hang on and be sure to read at the last paragraph if you get tired of the middle. It’s May and Mental Health Awareness Month and everyone knows I like to talk about mental health, so I have tied this into it magically. So, let’s begin.
I started part-time as a computer operator for the company that had an AS400 while working at a fast-food restaurant and going to a community college full-time. The job was boring just making sure jobs went through the queues and moving them around to empty ones and getting them processed fast and delivering reports that were spitted out on the printer. The difficult part was Friday afternoons when the manufacturing company was doing scheduling and those jobs had to have priority. I got pretty good at it and got hired full-time. Mind you this was 1995 and I was into Windows not these terminals with yellow writing on them. The community college was teaching on AS400 stuff too RPG and Cobol, blah. But now the fun begins.
They brought in Windows and moved along to using that while keeping the AS400 stuff. And the manager they brought used a consultant to do everything so I took to learning everything I could about Windows Server NT 4. The first time I got in trouble was when I helped the accountant share his spreadsheets on his machine with the rest of the accounting teams. My boss said they were taking up space on the server by being shared on the accountant’s local computer. Hmmm…does anybody think this makes sense? Yeah, 19-year-old me knew it didn’t either. So, here goes the quest to get certified as an MCSE on NT 4. I shadowed our consultant, I was like glued to him when he came in, got books, read as much as I could, play with stuff on my personal computer at home, and learned. Passed all the tests on the first go around and had my MCSE, MCP+Internet, and MCDBA in like four to six years.
Ok, now for the next fun story, let’s see what to pick from. Oh, I get in trouble for putting memory in the CEO’s laptop. The manager hands me some memory and says got put in the CEO’s laptop. Now we had two different types of Dell laptops which means two different types of memory so I asked him should I make sure if it was compatible with this machine first. He tells me no go do it now! So, having been sternly told to do it now, I go do it. Well, the CEO machine has issues, and the CEO is not happy and asks what I did so I tell him how I was ordered to do it. This CEO has a bad temper and starts yelling at me about how I should never do anything that I’m told to do unless I know it’s the right thing to do (btw he kept a baseball bat in his office) and had a bad temper. That was the first or last time I was on the end of yelling from the CEO.
Oh, what next, we are getting ready to upgrade our accounting system. It comes with this big fat manual that can be photocopied with all the changes. I’m ordered by my manager not to provide a copy to the head accountant. Next thing I know I’m called into the CFO’s office whose temper was even worse than the CEO’s (he had once thrown a small bald eagle statue at someone) and asked why I wasn’t giving the accountant the documentation. Now me being in my early 20s, maybe 20 or 21, I’m too afraid to tell him and I’m just stuttering and get yelled at to make him a copy. So, I just do it and suffer the wrath of my manager. Which included a nasty voicemail on my phone and yelling when he got back into the office.
There was so much toxicity in this company that I held my first three positions, at one point I get ready to just walk out the CFO’s mom who worked there stops me, it was a Friday and Monday, and I have a job with the subsidiary as a Web Developer reporting to him. Which still wasn’t the greatest but still much better than my manager who regularly yelled at me for fixing things. Some of the employees had even developed code ways of telling me they needed help once I moved out from underneath that manager so they could get help with simple things. He couldn’t even set up his laptop to get on the network. This was a family-owned company of fewer than 200 people, I and he was in the IT department.
During my seven-year prison sentence there, I had four or three positions. I got my MCSE, MCP+Internet, and MCDBA. I learned Windows NT 4 and 2000, SQL Server 7, and Visual Basic 6. I finished my two-year degree in Information Systems programming degree in four years. So, I got to learn a lot, but I was put through the wringer with the manager, the day he got fired I hate to say was a happy day for me.
So, the reason I choose to write about how horrible this was for a first job, is because if anybody at all is in this situation please get out, you deserve better. It’s not good for your mental health. No job is ever worth your mental health. I won’t discuss what my mental health was like during this period, but you can guess it wasn’t good. Save your mental health.
Terrific blog Tracy!!! I was in a similar toxic situation I could have sworn we worked at the same place.
Saddest part I realized years later was I thought this was normal.