Then, one day, out of the blue, I got a call to schedule an interview with this company I had never heard of. Let me stress this, I had *never* heard of these people, and I had never given them my resumŽ. But apparently they had gotten a copy of it, maybe from a job fair? That's one of those things I never asked and never found out about.

Anyway, the IS Department at West Coast Beauty Supply was looking for a part- time Operator to help do miscellaneous jobs. I took the BART to San Francisco and walked to Ninth and Folsom. San Francisco is quite old, and there are parts of the city that show it. Market Street, especially towards the Embarcadero, has a lot of shiny new buildings and a certain modernance to it. Go about 10 blocks down and it gets older and grimier. WCBS headquarters was on the second floor of a building, in the corner. The first floor was the San Francisco store of WCBS.

Quick overview: WCBS sells beauty products to retailers and salons. They have an efficient system to take supplies from the various manufacturers and ship them to local WCBS stores, which sell them to those two customer types. They don't sell to the general public, due to contractual stipulations and generally inadequate infrastructure to deal with retail customers. Now that I think about it, the company was very much like any other distributor, such as the game distributors that I'm more familiar with.

The San Francisco store itself (well, they're two San Francisco stores, they call stores by the city names, and if there are two or more stores the others have North, South, etc appened to their names. So there was San Francisco and San Francisco South stores, with the second being the newer one) was also a shipping store. This meant that they had extra storage, assigned trucks and truck drivers, and extra people to handle phone orders. Shipping stores tended to be busy all the time, while a lot of Point of Sale stores are quite laid back and peaceful.

So I went up to the second floor and was shown to the IS Department. There I met Jon Putnam, who was head of the department. Jon was a relatively recent hire and he had a lot of energy. He was head of the department for three years while I was at WCBS, and he ran it like his own little fiefdom. But we did get our job done, and he was loyal to his people as we were to him. In this company, IS had a lot of responsibilities to keep everything running. Jon made sure of that and was ideal at keeping the rest of the company from swamping us with projects.

My interview with Jon went well. Then I also interviewed with Patrick Huber, who ran the mainframe system. Patrick is only a few years older than me. Hired by Jon, Patrick was slowly working on getting his BS degree while working full time. Patrick is a great guy, personable, talkative, certainly a jokester most of the time. He knows VMS and how to get things done. Perhaps it's because I'm not very talkative myself, but I tend to gravitate to more extroverted people.

I had my only suit on, which after that day I never wore again. Jon hired me on the spot and asked me to come in that Sunday to get some training from Jeff Brown, who I was replacing. Jeff was moving to Portland to go to school there, although he would still be working for IS as our representative in the Northwest region. I think the next time I wore a suit was for my interview at Oracle, and then another one at Tomasseti's wedding. Maybe one or two other times in the last six years, but I'm not a suit type of guy.

So that's how I got my first job after college. It came suddenly, after months of looking it found me. It was only part time, and $9 an hour at that. But that wouldn't last long and it was the start of a fondly remembered four years of my life. The date was Friday, September 10th, 1993.