What is/was your occupation?

Left school at 15 did rabbit & kangaroo shooting along with being a Rouseabout in shearing sheds and other odd jobs for 3 years.
Joined the Australian Army for 6 years, spent 12 months in Vietnam.
Discharged from the Army and worked for a Security Company doing baggage searches at the local Airport. Landed a Security job with the Fed Govt. at the same airport. Then became an Airport Safety Officer, that was the best job of my life, I absolutely loved it until I was forced into retirement after a total of 25 years at the airport.
I am now enjoying my retirement with my wife of 50 years.
I also enjoy watching my Grandkids grow and helping them with my knowledge and life experiences.

Currently doing IT for a news station. Previously did IT for a school district. Got my A+ and network and security certs back in 2009 in high school through a mentorship career program. I used those certs to do some helpdesk jobs and then got where I am today

I always tinkered with tech as a kid. First game system was the atari 2600, first pc was windows 95, which I then upgraded to 98. 64MB of ram. 4GB hard drive, had a Zip disk it was awesome. Then later got my hands on a windows 2000 pro computer and that thing was awesome. Also got my first playstation and was hooked ever since.

I always was known for having my hands in all the cookie jars so to speak. If someone was willing to teach it I would do my best to learn it. I'm a jack of all trades, master of none haha. But pretty much in every tech category that exists I know a little bit or just enough to be dangerous.

andrew129260 said:

just enough to be dangerous

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Yes, I'm a member of that club, too. Sounds like you have a good background to provide a lot of useful input.

glasskuter said:

Yes, I'm a member of that club, too. Sounds like you have a good background to provide a lot of useful input.

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Thank you. I try. I liked reading everyones backgrounds here. Very cool that you worked for ATT. That must have been a fascinating job especially round that time. I remember you and a lot of other members here since 7 forums. Been a long time. I just randomly become active for a few months it seems and then I fade away only to come back later haha

glasskuter said:

Not as many participated in this thread as I had hoped.....

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My apologies, I've only just spotted that this thread exists

I studied electronic engineering at uni, specialising in digital electronics by the final year. This was back in the '70s. On graduating I joined an electronics research lab. The only computing language I was formally taught was Fortran IV at uni, but by the end of that career I had picked up Pascal, C++ and Assembly language for the Data General Eclipse. I had also become the de-facto 'IT support guy' for my department (there not being any actual formal IT support). It was all Windows for Workgroups 3.11 back then.

My first PC at home was an IBM PC/AT that I'd cobbled together from redundant equipment being decommissioned at the lab. My first ISP was on the other end of a 14.4 kbit/s dial-up modem.

But after 20+ years the parent company was going under and I was made redundant. So, I then spent a couple of years as a full-time 'stay at home' parent bringing up my daughter. My wife had health issues at that time that meant she spent a lot of time away in hospital.

Then one day a neighbour, who worked for a small IT support company, asked if I'd be interested in a couple of weeks work. It was upgrading the desktops for a major company (upgrading the HDDs, installing the company's Win'95/Office image, configuring for the user) and they need all the hands they could muster. "I can only promise it will be a couple of weeks" he had said. That 'couple of weeks' turned into a 10+ year career in IT support, collecting quite a few Microsoft Certified Professional certificates along the way. I could turn my hand to anything our customers needed (we once did software upgrades for a printing firm's Macs) but my specialist subject was server administration, both NT4 Server and Microsoft Exchange Server.

Then of course firms started to cut costs and IT support was an easy target. Most was moved off-shore. So after a few dwindling years our small company went down and I was made redundant (again).

This time I did the maths, and worked out I could afford (just) to live off my savings and some investments until I was 50, when I could take my modest company pension from career number one.

I learned a lot of skills in my career as an IT support engineer, I though I knew quite lot. Then I joined Ten Forums and learned far more from the members there than I had ever though possible. Quite likely far more than I had known (or used) while working in IT support.


Edit: oh yes, I nearly forgot. My IT company sent me to the UK launch event for Windows '95.
As MS said at the time "I was there at the Start". Been there - done that - got the T-shirt.

@Bree

Ain't it GRAND how much we can pick up from our forums? My wonderful lady is forever asking me (from another room) what I shouted "Yes!", or "That's it!", or "Okay!" at the monitor about, and all I can say is that I learned something just now.

Bloody marvelous!

Oh, BTW, thanks for that bit of bio. I just learned something.

That's a sweet shirt @Bree

I could tell you but if I told you, I would have to kill you.