My first day at West Coast Beauty Supply was a Sunday in San Francisco. At the time, and when I left, WCBS was primarily a Monday to Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM sort of company. All the stores had those hours, and HQ had those hours. Only two stores were open on Saturday by the time I left, and Sunday was definitely an off day. San Francisco itself is quite less crowded on Sunday than on weekdays. There is just a huge influx of people that go to San Francisco to work. They're everywhere when you step outside and walk around. On Sunday though, there are few people unless there's some kind of special event. And at West Coast HQ it's just the Sunday operator, who is primarily responsible for backing up the system before Monday. This Sunday it was just me and Jeff Brown.

Jeff showed me around, we went through the schedule and did the backups plus some other IS jobs. Didn't really get to know him much, and I didn't see him again for a couple of years, although I did talk to him occassionally. Jeff went to Portland to go to school and study art. He did work for the IS department, as our only non-HQ based representative. Since the stores range from northern Washington to Bakersfield, California, we don't have the luxury of going to a store to fix a problem. If we can't talk them through a problem, or dial in and fix it remotely, we have to go there if it's really bad, or more often just send them replacement equipment which we then have to talk the store people through the installation. So having Jeff within easy driving distance of a half dozen stores helped a lot. There are some twenty stores near the Bay Area, so this leaves a dozen or so stores outside of easy support range.

Initially I worked Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. This was a great schedule, as I still had a lot of free time to good off. The IS department at the time consisted of Jon Putnam, head of the department, Patrick Huber, system admin for the mainframe, Bea Cary, who I think was in in charge of the help desk and eventually was in charge of all the Operators by the time I left. Also there were Greg Welliver and Bob Marsh, the hardware guys. I didn't see them much initially since those two were busy installing the computer systems in some of the Northwest stores. Lonnie To was a consultant who took care of our store systems. Sam Kyu was our mainframe programmer. Steven Chan and I forget the other guy's name were the other two Operators besides myself. I had the day shift, Steven had swingshift and the other Operator had graveyard. Giving the department 24 hour coverage weekdays, none on Saturday, about eight hours on Sunday. As I said, the company was 8 to 5 predominantly, so the swingshift was responsible for running a bunch of batch jobs and supporting the sales people, who used our computer system at the time to enter their orders. The graveyard person was responsible for running some other batch jobs and the nightly incremental backups.

Mainly my job was to sit at the help desk and answer the phone. A lot of that initially was taking down the problem and notifying Patrick or Bea so they could fix it. I also had to monitor the mainframe, break up the printouts and sort them, and not much else. I took the first month to learn the DEC VMS system, reading a few of the manuals. Well written by the way, much better than Unix manuals that I'd seen in college, although I haven't seen the Solaris manuals.

I read the manuals, then proceeded to set up my mainframe environment to simulate some common Unix commands. I wrote several scripts to automate things and make my life easier. I suppose these signs of initiative prompted Jon to promote me to full time after a couple of months. Sunday and Tuesday to Friday. It was a great time to fool around with a mainframe and learn the kind of things you need to know when you have a job. Such as health benefits and 401K, learning how to deal with the commute, knowing what you need to do to get things done. The first six months I didn't really know anything about the stores or the store computer systems, so I didn't get to know Lonnie or Greg or Bob. That was about to change...