Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-35319541-20180504041259/@comment-35065776-20180505062909

Apologies for the length ...

I'll get some of this out of order, but here goes... In junior high/high school I worked summers running the snack bar at a swim club, mowed the grounds for our church, was a summer janitor at a local high school (not my own), worked maintenance for a local business, was a summer camp counselor for spoiled kids, and worked my last summer for the road department. (not all in the same summer, believe me!) I went to a military college to get commissioned into the US Army, but due to a ridiculously embarrassing accident I had to take a medical excusal my senior year and suddenly find a different career path. Went to graduate school to get an MA in English Lit, had to come home early (finished the MA at a local college later on) and started to work as a temp at AT&T. After 2 years of that (Marketing) I got hired (with 6 C-level math credits at college level, mind you) into the Accounting department. Worked there as a clerk for a few years, then my boss promoted me to management (as a surprise) and I moved over to corporate books where I mostly ran reports off the GL system and designed other reports based on that data. Then my previous boss (the one who promoted me) asked me to come work for him again in the GL system team. that was an interesting job - I had to learn UNIX before I could do anything, since this was still pre-windows use and we had to do all our documentation in nroff. After he left, our new boss basically stopped what we were doing and moved us over to the helpdesk group, where we sort of stagnated for several years. When I finally got a new boss, she put me in charge of network printing, which was a really fascinating job where I got to deal with people from IBM (wonderful team I got to deal with) and folks from locations all over the world. I had that job for a number of years; bosses came and went, but my last one came in the midst of the Lucent (we had moved over to Lucent during the spinoff in 1996) stock value crash, and during all the layoffs nobody wanted to say 'no' to their boss, so she kept taking on more and more responsibilities for us, so in the end I did my original job as well as did some QC work, and supported several online systems for sales teams. Oh yeah, also got put in charge with a coworker of the data archiving system. Never a dull moment (or a free one). With all that going on we started to feel like we were indispensable - sadly, nobody else felt that way. I got laid off in early 2007 just 2 years shy of a fully vested pension. After that I worked for a tiny company for a year doing IT support of all sorts for small non-profit organizations in the Trenton NJ area - mostly companies helping medically challenged people (autism mostly). Got laid off from that one because my 2 main clients both became alienated by my boss who was brilliant, but knew it and felt that everyone should do things his way no matter what. My clients disagreed, so they cancelled their contracts and I was left with not nearly enough work to stay on. After that i was out of work again for a few months but found a job doing on-site computer repairs for corporate and residential customers; it was not a great paying job (unemployment would have paid more by 25%) but I did that job from 2009 through 2015. I had to leave because I was diagnosed with cancer in August 2015 and started chemo; the side-effects include neuropathy that make it difficult to walk steadily and to hold small objects securely (like my tools), and writing can be a challenge (the legibility part). Been doing chemo off and on since then, and games like this help me occupy my time, since I'm now officially on Social Security Disability and unemployable. I'm still pretty optimistic (I surprise the doctors I encounter with my sense of humor) but the only real cure is surgical removal, which they tried and couldn't do. But I'm seriously not mentioning that to garner sympathy - just figured this place was the best place to give my current status. (Spent Wednesday and today in NYC at the Memorial Sloan Kettering location dealing with a pulmonologist, trying to get rid of what turns out is a respiratory virus that's been making me cough like a maniac for the past 2 months.  Had a bronchoscopy this morning, so next week they'll finally know the root cause and then they can make if go away!

Anyway, I got sidetracked - but somewhere along the line I had part-time side jobs doing data entry at the USGA headquarters in town, and after that I spent a year using the local paper's new computerized layout system to make sure the final product had ads in all the right places and no gaps where there could have been more ads.