Your first real job is a whole new world. I'm not counting working at Naugles/ Del Taco when I was in high school. Sure, I had to keep regular hours and fill out a time card and file an income tax form. But those are minor tasks that pale in comparison to what you have to do in a real job. At best I can say that those teenage fast-food jobs are good at promoting a sense of time and teamwork in people. Certainly I'm not using my taco or burrito making skills today (and I blame working there for my current distate of all Mexican food).

At West Coast Beauty Supply there were a lot of differences from that occupation of my youth. Now I had a 401k plan and real skills I had to learn. I was also on my own so I had to budget my expenses (something I still don't do well to this day). But I've talked about this before. Today I want to focus on the skills I learned at West Coast and how I apply those skills today. Although I don't use the really obvious things like Cobol or Netware, I've been able to apply that knowledge to my work at Oracle and to daily life.

I guess we can start with my first "application", VMS. Not so much the whole operating system as DCL, the Digital Command Language, which is equivalent to a fancy shell language if you've used Unix. I wrote lots of little scripts and even a full-fledged program that allowed users to control the job queues, according to their priviledges (and VMS has a great security system). Heck, Access Control Lists, a Journaled File System, Job Queues, what's not to love? In any case, this experienced did instill in me an appreciation for system scripts that tie programs together and has led to learning and using Applescript in my home system.

There's also all the backups I did. I learned how to run a proper backup, the importance of rotating tapes and archiving them offsite, having a recovery plan. Not that I've been able to use these particular skills. Basically the only backups I do at home and work are of the occassionaly-copy-files-somewhere- else variety. Add to that system maintenance and operation and working with a battery backup and I have a sense of how to properly run a mainframe system. Not necessarily what I need to do, since I'd be helpless with a Unix system, but the attitude you need to have to run a system that if it goes down for a few days, your business is history.

Moving on to when I was put in charge of store support, I learned how to use a PC and move around in DOS. Also learned Netware and networking in general. Networking is definitely a great skill to have: both the principles as well as how to set up and troubleshoot a network. Useful when I built my internal network and when something goes wrong I usually don't have to call our IS department for help. We also used remote control software (some product I have only seen at West Coast, but it worked great with DOS terminals, not so great with Windows which is probably why PC Anywhere is dominant now). I use remote control software a lot today to control my NT Workstation from my Mac (and to control that lab machine I always seem to have to reboot after the lab is locked up).

FoxPro and Cobol I also learned. FoxPro is a database system while Cobol is a language for creating database-using programs. Never had to create any large Cobol programs from scratch, although I did have to modify several. FoxPro on the other hand was practically my main development environment. I wrote a generic forms system, which took a while. Several small programs that analyzed one-shot (or once yearly) data and report on them. Lots of data conversion programs in FoxPro (when you run several off-the-shelf systems, you find out that they each save data in a different format, quite annoying). The skills I learned here are how to work with a relational database (which FoxPro was very close to being, at least the version I used). Certainly helps when I work with the databases at my current company.

I'm out of space, although I think I'm done. There are a lot of soft skills you learn at a job: how to work with people and teammates, present reports and give opinions, cost analysis and disaster prevention. Oh, I almost forgot that I learned how to take a PC apart and scavenge parts. And working with a VT 420 terminal (we have a VT 520 in the switch room, brings back old memories). Servicing a laser printer, filling out trouble tickets, talking to hysterical users and calming them down. Hmm, sort of like going to a trade school for four years.