The other day at lunch some of my coworkers were talking about the crappy jobs they’ve had in the past when they were young. Like in high school and college. Jobs in food service or retail or whatever. I realized that my first job was working for a financial services company just before my senior year in high school when I was 16. I had to get a work permit for that internship. And I’ve worked in an office environment every day since then. With my 32nd birthday quickly approaching, that makes 16 years* of business experience under my belt. Half of my life has been spent in a cube! Well, at FeedBurner we didnt’ have cubes, but everywhere else.

Before I was 16 I remember going into my mom’s tiny office in our small town and filing sometimes for a couple bucks an hour. At the insurance office she worked at there were like less than 5 people and “the boss” was a family friend. That was about the extent of my experience before an internship in my senior year. I remember at my interview I talked about our cats! And somehow I got hired. My first day I was so young and naive. I remember that for the life of me I could not understand what this whole office building of people could be doing as they sat there at typewriters and computers. No idea. How could they all be typing letters and memos? That was about the extent of my experience. And mostly at that job all I did was type letters and memos and file, but I ended up staying with that company for 7 years. I went from interning in a phone center to interning in marketing to a full time job in marketing and then multimedia communications and then on to the IT department. When I left I was programming web sites. Not bad for having been so clueless to start off with.

After that I was with TMP/Monster for 5 years as a web developer and interaction designer. Then FeedBurner for a year and now Google.

* My only break was after I was laid off about a year and a half or so ago. I was off for 3 months, but in 16 years, that’s not much. Also, I did one time have a job as a cashier, but it was only for 6 months to get some extra cash to buy a car and I was also holding down a full-time job as a programmer and going to college at night at that point. That was a crazy time, working all day and all night. I remember that including the weekends I would only have a few hours one night each week to do my laundry and anything else that needed to get done. The photo on the right is a photo of me from that time.