I took a job right out of tech school as a help desk tech at a local mom and pop computer store in the fall of 2002 if I remember the year, it might have even been 2003.

QCI - Quality Computers Incorporated.

I began by building new systems for them, just me and the owner of the company. If I remember correctly we were building socket 478 P4 and Celerons with Tyan motherboards. That is about all I can recall specs wise.

Also did migrations, DSL setups, malware/virus removal. I can remember fighting with Norton System Works and all of the crap it left in registry like it was yesterday.

Windows XP but still pretty new to the market and a lot of the systems I worked on were 9x based. Pretty easy to corrupt.

I have some fond and no so fond memories of that job, 🤣. But it is where I got started.

The true first job was me freelancing for "pizza-money" in 2002-2005, helping people get their computers fixed on a budget. Most of my customers were friends and co-workers through the resturant I worked at. I built systems, modified my friend's computers to run better, removed viruses manually, saved a few college careers in the process. I have a lot of hilarious stories from that time involving a "Serial Porn Surfer" who was actually an ex-bandmate of mine that I was constantly cleaning up after....he would literally sneak in during parties and look up porn on people's college work PC's.

My actual, full on, legit adult job in I.T. was independent contractor upgrading a plumbing supply warehouse spring of 2004, I got the job 2 weeks after I just got A+ Certified. It was a 2 day project that involved replacing the outdated Pentium machines with brand new HP Workstations, including some clever sidewalk engineering to fit the new 17" CRT monitors where the 15" CRTs were - as they sat in weird metal cradles under the front counter - inset into the counter, with plexiglass over the top.

A far cry from what I do now that much is for sure - racking servers, managing major software deployments, some support stuff, including doing hardware repairs on laptops and desktops, and being sort of the "Go-to-guy" where I work as I have a lot of crazy experience from 15 years doing I.T. and messing with computers in general, and seem to always figure out a way to fix something, even if it's very weird.

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Jed118 wrote on 2021-04-07, 20:25:

Owner said he'll buy my parts (some old 386 mobos, RAM, whatever parts could not be made into full computers) and asked me where I got it all from, so I explained it to him. His hiring criteria was to go to the back and build him a system around as many parts as I had brought with me, filling in the gaps with his stock.

I was able to make a booting 386 in something like 45 minutes. I was hired.

I like that story, i wonder if people still hire on that basis now (i mean a practical test / demonstration of ability rather than all the paperwork and 2 stage interviews etc)

btw, whats the best time for assembling a 386 since? 😀

1980 as an illegal intern (12 years old), data-entry on a PDP-11.

gerry wrote on 2021-04-08, 08:47:

I like that story, i wonder if people still hire on that basis now (i mean a practical test / demonstration of ability rather than all the paperwork and 2 stage interviews etc)

Back in 2009 when applying for a job I was given a PC or server and told to runup and put on the internet, that was it. I cant remember but they had 1 "trick" that I was supposed to google, I said I didnt think I was allowed to use google! but didn't get the job, I was a bit annoyed but not that upset seemed like a backyard business.

For me 1999 just out of high school I worked the front desk for a office supply shop in my hometown I mainly did over the counter stuff like toner, paper, etc and booked in PC's, Copiers, faxes that came in for repair. I was hoping to move "out the back" but I was terrible at that job which also induced cashing out end of the day and my maths is so bad I could never get the till to balance (sometimes up, sometimes down) and chasing outstanding depts. After a year they very nicely asked if I wanted to leave and I said yes without hesitation.

My first real Techie job was around 2002? I cant quite remember either in Sydney. I remember installing XP SP1 on a whole of of P3's fairly early on but we also upgraded a bunch of server from 2000 to 2003.
I was real lucky with that job, was just 3 engineers in their early 20's and the boss in his 30's. You were more or less assigned clients and you were left to do everything from quotes though to installation, site visits, scheduling basically everything accept billing so avoided "hell desk" until 2008 really.
I only left that job when I moved to the UK, Funny enough the more senior engineer of the 3 of us (only 1 year older) ended up moving over to the UK for a bit after coming to visit me and we still meet up whenever I go home. My brother also ended up working there (he didn't last long though) and still in contact with the other engineer I worked with who had left and since come back. Even the boss' wife got in contact last year just to say hi, yeh I got lucky with that job

gerry wrote on 2021-04-08, 08:47:

Jed118 wrote on 2021-04-07, 20:25:

Owner said he'll buy my parts (some old 386 mobos, RAM, whatever parts could not be made into full computers) and asked me where I got it all from, so I explained it to him. His hiring criteria was to go to the back and build him a system around as many parts as I had brought with me, filling in the gaps with his stock.

I was able to make a booting 386 in something like 45 minutes. I was hired.

I like that story, i wonder if people still hire on that basis now (i mean a practical test / demonstration of ability rather than all the paperwork and 2 stage interviews etc)

btw, whats the best time for assembling a 386 since? 😀

My workstudy position had a "here's a PC, it's broken, make it work" scenario. IIRC it was either the RAM was unplugged or the hard disk was. A co-worker of mine simply had no power cable. Not just not plugged in, but it was simply not there at all. This sometimes happens at a University campus 😉

I'll be assembling an EISA system 486 soon, it's a bit complex but it shouldn't take more than 30 mins to fit all the hardware in. In this case more, as I have to replace the AT power supply. It'll be on my channel soon 😉

Sometimes it takes months due to parts availability 😉

I was hoping to move "out the back" but I was terrible at that job which also induced cashing out end of the day and my maths is so bad I could never get the till to balance

I started out back, but the owner quickly saw I was better at sales. He even gave me commission - $2 for a monitor and $3 per PC. I recall I was routinely making an extra $30 over the weekends. That's 1997 dollars, for a 15 year old. He saw that I was spending most of my money at his store (he gave me good discounts) and I'd haul off entire systems on my bike (built a tray in the rear so I can haul monitors) so he started paying me in BramptonComputes dollars (at a higher rate) instead of cash, which worked out fine as I would still get discounts on parts that I would buy to assemble entry-to-mid level PCs and take out ads in the newspaper. I made WAY more money this way, at the end of 1997 I was able to buy a CRX. Which I couldn't legally drive. 😉

I worked fast food in high school and college.

My first job with computers was a programming … um... internship? Basically they needed something and they could only afford me. I developed a pretty shitty web app in like two weeks that ultimately went no where, and then I did something kind of cool with mail in surveys and barcodes scanners.

In high school junior and senior year (2002-2004) and then after for a few years, I was the lead technician at the TV studio there. I negotiated $25/hr.. 🤣. I maintained all sorts of stuff -- Amiga 4000 Video Toaster, 20 workstations, 3 non-linear editors, a Globalstreams Trinity, mixers, video multiplexers, 3 studio cameras, waveform vectorscopes, scan converters, SVHS professional decks, automated DVD duplicators, several Canon XL1's, DMX lighting equipment, ENG bags full of wireless audio equipment, etc. It was pretty fun. I got to repair all sorts of stuff, build computers, provide live production support, etc.

After that I worked at a car dealership which sucked but I got to drive all sorts of cool cars.. then I got an internship at a nuke plant -- now I've been there for 10 years as a principal engineer responsible for all the plant process computer systems. Lots of OT -- over 640hrs in 2020.

First job, straight out of college back in the mid 90s working as a code monkey for a small software house in Stirling. Working on a line of business suite written in BASIC on a Linux system. Oh, and it was an INTERPRETED version of BASIC. So anyone who bought the suite would also have needed to buy the language as well. Before you ask no, the company no longer exists. It went bankrupt when I was still there.

In 1990 got a job doing CAD (computer assisted drafting) work involving sheet metal layouts and rotary type machine assemblies. Remember the
computers were Sun systems networked to a mainframe. Don't remember the CAD program, think it ran on Solaris OS.

I actually got started a bit later in the game, around 2010. I had just finished high school and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. My uncle gave me a broken old laptop, something from the early 2000s. It was in a pretty sorry state, but he challenged me to get it working again.
I had no idea where to start, so I turned to Google and YouTube for guidance. After countless hours of troubleshooting, replacing parts, and learning about operating systems, I managed to resurrect the thing. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. That was a super proud moment for me, and it sparked my interest in tech.
I remember just how much I loved the process of breathing life back into that old laptop. It was like solving a giant puzzle. Over the next few years, I found myself doing similar jobs for friends and family and even making a little money on the side.
That spark I found in reviving old tech now fuels my own web development business. It's a wild leap, I know, but the journey has been incredible. If you're curious about how I made that transition, I've penned down my experiences and steps in an article. For more info, feel free to check it out.

Working in a large team to make entity-relationship diagrams to map all the data involved in our client's business processes. It was a traditional ERD instead of the IDEF1X format I used (and am still using) more frequently later. It was also a quite ambitious project (blame my boss, I guess), and I remember the late nights, the overtime, the business trips, and the sore throat which turned out to heal faster with turmeric instead of antibiotics. I also remember the rebound girlfriend I had during that time, whom I broke up with a few months later. Ah, and this song was one of the hottest songs in MTV Asia during that time, despite it was actually released one year earlier (although the first release was a failure, while the 2001 re-release was a hit).

I worked at the porn industry...but not any kind of porn, I am talking VERY EXTREME stuff.
My job was to infiltrate forums and pretend to be one of the "adepts" and promote the site I was working for without they knowing so they would subscribe to it (this was around 2003, such services were quite common). The kind of content the company offered was...well, let's just say it had a lot to do with bodly functions...
Aside from that, I was also a moderator in their forum... more or less like Vogons, but with people discussing about golden showers instead of golden era computers, not to mention the pictures shared there (again, just like Vogons where people want to show their crap, except it was literal crap in this case).
Didn't last much and got fired on my second day, it probably had something to do with me not taking the job seriously (how could I? Their movie titles were hilarious... how can you promote "Atomic Farts Inside your Mouth Part II" with a straight face?).
Years later, when people tried to show me the infamous "Two Girls One Cup" video, they were kinda disapointed because I didn't get shocked by it.

I Helped get a computer built for my Sister. I think it was originally a 486dx-33 with 4mb of RAM, CDROM and Sound card.
Installed DOS and Win-3.11 Microsoft Works and Lotus Office.

Helped teach them how to use it and later I wired her house with a Linksys Router and Ethernet networking.
They always wanted Networking and Faster internet service. This was back in 1990’s.

She would Pay me with Our Favorite Pizza which had a Restaurant down the street from her house.

gaffa2002 wrote on 2023-05-27, 01:04:

I worked at the porn industry...but not any kind of porn, I am talking VERY EXTREME stuff.
My job was to infiltrate forums and pretend to be one of the "adepts" and promote the site I was working for without they knowing so they would subscribe to it (this was around 2003, such services were quite common). The kind of content the company offered was...well, let's just say it had a lot to do with bodly functions...

How did you make them subscribe without them knowing? I also remember that era, but you still needed to input your email address to subscribe to anything. (And the unsubscribe form, where you had to enter your email to "stop subscribing", is even worse, because it is basically a trap.)

gaffa2002 wrote on 2023-05-27, 01:04:

Aside from that, I was also a moderator in their forum... more or less like Vogons, but with people discussing about golden showers instead of golden era computers, not to mention the pictures shared there (again, just like Vogons where people want to show their crap, except it was literal crap in this case).
Didn't last much and got fired on my second day, it probably had something to do with me not taking the job seriously (how could I? Their movie titles were hilarious... how can you promote "Atomic Farts Inside your Mouth Part II" with a straight face?).
Years later, when people tried to show me the infamous "Two Girls One Cup" video, they were kinda disapointed because I didn't get shocked by it.

Interesting. While we're at it, I know goatse is still alive, now on a Russian site, while lemonparty is only available on Wayback Machine. Unfortunately I cannot find tubgirl, ratemypoo, sukatoro, and rotten dot com. For example, this is what I get every time I try to find tubgirl. I wonder if there are still backups somewhere, somehow. Same goes with Two Girls One Cup, I just cannot find the video anymore, while my offline backup was accidentally deleted.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote on 2023-05-29, 06:25:

How did you make them subscribe without them knowing? I also remember that era, but you still needed to input your email address […]
Show full quote

gaffa2002 wrote on 2023-05-27, 01:04:

I worked at the porn industry...but not any kind of porn, I am talking VERY EXTREME stuff.
My job was to infiltrate forums and pretend to be one of the "adepts" and promote the site I was working for without they knowing so they would subscribe to it (this was around 2003, such services were quite common). The kind of content the company offered was...well, let's just say it had a lot to do with bodly functions...

How did you make them subscribe without them knowing? I also remember that era, but you still needed to input your email address to subscribe to anything. (And the unsubscribe form, where you had to enter your email to "stop subscribing", is even worse, because it is basically a trap.)

gaffa2002 wrote on 2023-05-27, 01:04:

Aside from that, I was also a moderator in their forum... more or less like Vogons, but with people discussing about golden showers instead of golden era computers, not to mention the pictures shared there (again, just like Vogons where people want to show their crap, except it was literal crap in this case).
Didn't last much and got fired on my second day, it probably had something to do with me not taking the job seriously (how could I? Their movie titles were hilarious... how can you promote "Atomic Farts Inside your Mouth Part II" with a straight face?).
Years later, when people tried to show me the infamous "Two Girls One Cup" video, they were kinda disapointed because I didn't get shocked by it.

Interesting. While we're at it, I know goatse is still alive, now on a Russian site, while lemonparty is only available on Wayback Machine. Unfortunately I cannot find tubgirl, ratemypoo, sukatoro, and rotten dot com. For example, this is what I get every time I try to find tubgirl. I wonder if there are still backups somewhere, somehow. Same goes with Two Girls One Cup, I just cannot find the video anymore, while my offline backup was accidentally deleted.

Sorry, the way I wrote was confusing... What they couldn't know was the fact that I was hired by the company, otherwise I would be banned from the forums we participated. I had to pretend to be one of the users and casually convince them to subscribe, like I was just another subscriber recommending the service.
Once they subscribed, believe it or not, the service was legit. They had access to the promissed content and even had DVDs shipped directly to their homes (remember, it was the early 2000s). They also had a tech support number to call and it was legit, in fact, the girls from tech support sat at the same room as us.
I even remember one of the employees being accused from stealing blank DVDs and the two guys involved almost fighting over it, 🤣.

gaffa2002 wrote on 2023-05-29, 10:23:

Sorry, the way I wrote was confusing... What they couldn't know was the fact that I was hired by the company, otherwise I would […]
Show full quote

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote on 2023-05-29, 06:25:

How did you make them subscribe without them knowing? I also remember that era, but you still needed to input your email address […]
Show full quote

gaffa2002 wrote on 2023-05-27, 01:04:

I worked at the porn industry...but not any kind of porn, I am talking VERY EXTREME stuff.
My job was to infiltrate forums and pretend to be one of the "adepts" and promote the site I was working for without they knowing so they would subscribe to it (this was around 2003, such services were quite common). The kind of content the company offered was...well, let's just say it had a lot to do with bodly functions...

How did you make them subscribe without them knowing? I also remember that era, but you still needed to input your email address to subscribe to anything. (And the unsubscribe form, where you had to enter your email to "stop subscribing", is even worse, because it is basically a trap.)

gaffa2002 wrote on 2023-05-27, 01:04:

Aside from that, I was also a moderator in their forum... more or less like Vogons, but with people discussing about golden showers instead of golden era computers, not to mention the pictures shared there (again, just like Vogons where people want to show their crap, except it was literal crap in this case).
Didn't last much and got fired on my second day, it probably had something to do with me not taking the job seriously (how could I? Their movie titles were hilarious... how can you promote "Atomic Farts Inside your Mouth Part II" with a straight face?).
Years later, when people tried to show me the infamous "Two Girls One Cup" video, they were kinda disapointed because I didn't get shocked by it.

Interesting. While we're at it, I know goatse is still alive, now on a Russian site, while lemonparty is only available on Wayback Machine. Unfortunately I cannot find tubgirl, ratemypoo, sukatoro, and rotten dot com. For example, this is what I get every time I try to find tubgirl. I wonder if there are still backups somewhere, somehow. Same goes with Two Girls One Cup, I just cannot find the video anymore, while my offline backup was accidentally deleted.

Sorry, the way I wrote was confusing... What they couldn't know was the fact that I was hired by the company, otherwise I would be banned from the forum. I had to pretend to be one of the users and casually convince them to subscribe, like I was just another subscriber recommending the service.
Once they subscribed, believe it or not, the service was legit. They had access to the promissed content and even had DVDs shipped directly to their homes (remember, it was the early 2000s). They also had a tech support number to call and it was legit, in fact, the girls from tech support sat at the same room as us.
I even remember one of the employees being accused from stealing blank DVDs and the two guys involved almost fighting over it, 🤣.

Ah, I see. The good old persuasion instead of harmful URLs.

What kind of adult contents did the company offer, by the way? Could you tell us more details?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote on 2023-05-29, 12:51:

Ah, I see. The good old persuasion instead of harmful URLs.

What kind of adult contents did the company offer, by the way? Could you tell us more details?

When I was being interviewed they said they were specialized in fetish, which 18 year old me innocently though was about people wearing leather and whipping each other. I was wrong, VERY wrong 🤣. Their categories included:
- People taking a dump on each other, and playing with the stuff.
- Farting
- Vomiting
- Spitting
- Golden shower
- FIlthy/bad smelling feet
- Combinations of the above

Have you ever thought of taking a dump in a blender, add vomit, some urine and make a delicious shake to share with your friends? Well, somebody already did... and made a movie of it 🙁. To give an idea, usually at the end of such videos people would look like Arnold Schwarzenegger fighting the Predator.

Aside from the more "messy" categories above, there was some other more specific stuff like:

-People standing or sitting over other people's heads
-People having their stomachs punched (punched hard, like the opening scene in Double Dragon)
-Suffocation, people being strangled or drowned, sometimes both.
-Dead people, which were actresses pretending to be dead, but bizarre nonetheless. They called this category Necrobabes 🤣

They did the whole process as well, I mean, they produced the movies and pictures, hired actors and used studios... Believe it or not there was a lot of investment behind it and I got surprised that such market even existed. The company was physically located in Brazil, but the vast majority of customers were from US and Europe.
Despite the bizarre line of business, it was legit and looked no different than any office I worked until now. Didn't stay long as already mentioned but they ended up out of business sometime later, probably because internet became accessible and people could find similar stuff for free.