Intex Solutions is a
small and productive mortgage company. It's ever increasing in size and
profit. I worked there diligently for a month and a half during the Summer
of '96 doing data entry, 2 weeks with my friend, Martin. It was good pay
and the work wasn't too bad: it often included xeroxing stacks of paper,
entering tranche factors into the computer, scanning prospectices into
the computer, sorting stacks of paper, and creating binders for remittance
reports. During my senior year in high
school, I worked there every Thursday for a couple of hours to pick
up some extra pay. The atmosphere is nice there. The people are friendly
and the kitchen is hospitable.
Audiovisual Equipment
During the last three years of my career at high
school, I worked at the media department of the high school as audiovisual
aide. This meant that I deliver and pick up the daily requests of the teachers
and other odd jobs. The other odd jobs were cleaning up the various rooms,
fixing broken things, gophers (gotta love them!), duplicating tapes, setting
up computers, transporting computers, and anything else relating to computer
equipment. It was average pay and was a good experience. My partners were
as follows:
me as
During Year
End of Year
sophomore
Tim Hurst (senior)
Mike Fitzgerald
junior
Mike (senior)
Nicole Fitzgerald
senior
1. Nicole (sophomore)
2. Marc Oddo (freshman)
3. David DeLuca (freshman)
Marc and Dave (not me)
OfficeTeam
OfficeTeam (aka OfficeTemps) is a great temp agency.
In the summer if 1997, I found a couple of good jobs with them. I first
sent them my résumé to them, and I was called back by one
of the OfficeTeam Staffing. She sounded somewhat impressed with my accomplishments
in High School, and asked me to come in for an interview. When I got there,
I hadn't had a chance to get the birth certificate from the bank, so I
had to come back later with it, which is slightly disadvantageous because
I get lost EVERY single time I go into Boston! Anyway, I filled out a 4-6
page group of forms including a tax form, an agreement form, and others.
Then I told them which skills I was good at or had experience in, and I
took tests in those areas. Those areas were Excel, Word, data entry digits
and combination, and a speed typing test. Then I talked with my staffing
couselor and another person observing. The very next week, they called me with a job over
the weekend, from Friday to Saturday. It was at the Heinz Convention Center,
for the ADA, American Diabetes Assossiation. My job was registration, involving
entering people's information into the computer, printing name badges,
and handing out black bags. Customer Service was important wherreas we
were to treat the customer friendly and courtiously. I met a great 25 year
old named John Z. that I talked to and worked next to. He stayed up all
night the first night (Fri.) so the next day he randomly said "I got another
chill" which I couldn't quite figure out. He lived in Boston, so he was
able to give me some insight into city theory. We ate at the Panda express
and had orange chicken and it was EXCELLENT! We wanted to go back there
again, but there weren't enough working days, even though Marsela Robles
asked me to come back on Sunday. She even asked me to come back Monday,
but I had to go to other places. After another week, they asked me to work at BBG,
New Media, an advertising company in Stoneham, Thursday and Friday.
There I entered data again, but this time it was to help the company catch
up on their billing. I typed each day, person, company, and task accomplished,
for the first two weeks in June, so I helped them catch up, but not all
the way. They asked me to come back on Monday to finish up, but I had already
enlisted in Learningways, a company I preferred.
That same week on Thursday morning I went to Learningways
for an interview. I had already come in before, but this time I had already
read the C++ manual. They were not impressed enough for me to get the job
as programmer, but I was accepted as QA, Quality Assurance. I tested their
games such as the Shark 3 and 4. I made sure all the functions worked properly.
I learned how to use the Bugbase, taught others how to use it, and entered
bugs into it. It was a great job. I worked there for about two months in
the summer of 1997.
The last month of that summer I got my new P200
MMX, and I received an email from Kaon about beta testing their new
on-line tank game for pay. I couldn't refuse the offer, so I pursued this
deal. However I had many problems trying to figure it out. It took about
a month to set it up, but once I did I enjoyed it. It was the same thrill
I experienced with on-line gaming with Realms of Despair, but it was graphical.
Even though the graphics weren't that great, it was still an amazing innovation.
Unfortunately, they were only able to hire me 3 times. I thought it would
be a good part-time job, but they book other people over me. Of course
that could have been because I couldn't figure out how to play very fast
and kept going staight into the battle zones and dying!
I worked at STEP Tools during my second semester at RPI
which would be the first half of 1998. Since I was at school I couldn't
work full-time, but part-time, a maximum of 20 hours a week. My job title
was web developer and my tasks included converted their In-Step Newsletters
to HTML format and attempting to add a search engine to their web site,
which I wasn't able to complete. Hopefully I will be able to next semester.
I really wanted to program at Learningways the summer of
1998 because programming is my ultimate ambition, but there were no avails.
Through contacting Gabriela Delacroit for over 6 months, I was able to
obtain a job at Prentice Hall. This place is very familiar to me because
it's where my mother worked for a long time. Thanks to the wonders of connections,
I was able to get a job entitled "web development" there. But it turned
out to more quality assurance. So much so that it started out exaclty like
my job at Learningways. I tested their educational software systematically
for bugs, and then continued to enter bugs into their bugbase. (Their bugbase
wasn't as cool as Learningway's though :-). Differences arose, however.
It seems that it's not as much work for them to fix their bugs since the
program is based on a Director projector, so there's more time in between
releases. This is good news for me, because it means I get to spend time
doing other interesting things. Other miscellaneous tasks have been converting
a Powerpoint presentation to Director, programming in InstallShield, fixing
a registry, reconfiguring InstallShields I didn't have, testing competitor's
software, and much else. Since the commute it only 10 minutes each way
it's nice.
