When I moved out of Austin, I started working at the Hardee's in the town that I had moved to. I was there for two weeks when management offered me the opportunity to advance and get into management. Naturally I lept at the opportunity. Unfortunately, the district manager and I didn't get along very well at this new store. I had been there for exactly one year to the week when the district manager demoted the store manager and fired another supervisor and myself. Had I been smart I would have taken some time off and collected unemployment, but instead I went out and immediately found two other jobs.
One of those jobs was working at a grocery store. I started out as a cashier, and then moved over to the customer service department. From there, I moved to the General Merchandise department, where I helped stock the GM shelves and order product. During this time, I also went back and did some more cashiering, and helped out in the liquor store a few days a week. Working in the liquor store was slow at times, so I had plenty of time to browse the store and discover new drinks that I hadn't tried before. After four years of working at this grocery store, I finally quit.
The other job that I obtained and worked at during this same time was at Taco Bell, but I started out only doing this job one day a week. I didn't particularly like it, probably because it was so different than Hardee's was. However, after I quit from the grocery store, I started working Taco Bell full time, and shortly after I did, I was asked to move up to Shift Manager. I eagerly accepted the position (No, I obviously didn't learn from my first management experience that management isn't everything that it's cracked up to be). Out of the five Taco Bells in Rochester, I have worked at four of them, sometimes for extended periods of time, and have since been transferred from my home store to the store at the mall when they were suffering a management turnover. I have been working at Taco Bell for over five years now (Not bad for a job that you started out hating, huh?). However, I will soon be down to working only two days a week there again.
A few months after I quit the grocery store, I decided that I had far too much time on my hands, and not quite enough money, so I took yet another second job. This time I went to work for a security company, but only on Friday and Saturday nights. My main posting in the security company was for a trucking firm. It was an easy job...all I had to do was sit in my car all night and have truck drivers sign a log sheet saying that they were on the property. After I did that for a year, I did some guarding of Federal prisoners when they left the prison and had to have surgery at the local hospital. That was fun, and I got paid $12 just to sit in the room with the prisoner and watch TV with him. However, that posting wasn't all that reliable. So it was time to find a different job.
That job is working for IBM. However, it is only a supplemental manufacturing job. I work in Clean and Claim. What exactly is that? Well, after the computer makes it through the test process, it comes to us. I visually inspect the computer, carefully making sure that screws are where they are supposed to be and that they are tight, as well as other tasks, depending on the machine. I also put the voltage indicator on the computer, and put the cover on the machine. I bet you are thinking, "That's all he does?" or "Man, that is an easy job" or something to that effect. Well, No, that isn't all I do. I also have to put the computer in a box and send that box to shipping. LOL. During the slow months in early 1998, while it was slow in Clean & Claim, I was farmed out to SSD (also known as the disk area) There, I worked on an SDM--which stands for Single Disk Machine. This is a really peculiar name, considering that thirty disks can fit on a single disk machine. What did I do in the disk area? It was my job to polish the compact disks after the nickle plating was put on them. But I got back up to Clean & Claim late in second quarter, where I stayed for the rest of the time. How about going on an e-tour of the systems manufacturing area of IBM.
Okay, fast forward to January 1999. My time as a supplemental employee with IBM ended at the end of 1998. Fortunately for me, I was hired on permanently at that time (I was notified of this the week before Christmas, actually). However, because there were no openings for full time people in the systems area, I got hired on down in SSD, where I had worked for a few months last year. So while I still work for IBM, my duties and location have changed...but I don't have any images to show of where I work at now. My first night back down in SSD, in the area that I'm working in, I was told that I was going to be trained in as a back-up lead (but I'm actually only a back-up to the a back-up). However, all leads in that area are are over-glorified babysitters with no authority to do anything...unlike the way leads were when I was working up in the systems area. And I'm also one of the people now responsible for slurry mixing on the shift that I work on. Slurry is the chemical that is used to polish the nickle off of disks to get them to the right thickness.