Fresh out of high school, from August 1998 to September 1999, I worked as a contractor at IBM. It’s fun to have IBM on your resume, but this job was only a couple cuts above tech support.
IBM runs the computers for Sears: all the cash registers are dumb terminals and there’s an IBM rack in the back of the store somewhere with the brains that handles transactions and end-of-day accounting. My team (roughly 10 at any given time) talked a tech in the store through unplugging old equipment and rebooting servers while we updated IBM’s database to look for them on the frame relay network instead of the SNA.
Of course, while we did this, the cash registers didn’t work. So we worked 4 AM to noon, starting with east coast stores and working west with the time change, to make sure we always had plenty of time to get the stores working before they opened. I think only twice in the 10,000 stores did we ever run late, and neither time by more than a few minutes.
I know this sounds like a terribly dull and dead-end job, but it was great: I had a great team, decent pay for my low experience, and I could see that we were making steady progress towards well-defined goals.
