A bit about me - Work
Dennis' Lair

You Are Here Home -> A bit about me -> A bit about me - Work

Well, I've held more jobs than I can count immediately, so I guess I should start counting.

After graduation from high school, I took a short lived job as a receptionist at the Fantastic Sam's over on Valley View and YL Boulevard in Yorba Linda. Didn't last long - ended right before Christmas of 1993.

A few months after that, after some moving around (see the life bio for details there), I took a job with Bayview Adjustment Bureau, the adjustment firm for Coast National Insurance - an SR-22 auto insurance provider - transcribing recorded statements. I transferred to a dispatch position within the company, and burned out in October of that year.

A week after that, I took an order entry job with a mail order vitamin and homeopathic remedy company near John Wayne Airport called Tabak's Health Products. This lasted about seven months, and in retrospect wasn't really worth it owing to the fact that the bus commute to this job was two hours one way. I don't miss the commute.

Left there in May of 1995, spent some time being out of work (again), and took a part time graveyard position with a veterinary lab - Professional Animal Labs - over in Irvine. This was another one of those jobs that weren't worth the trouble above and beyond being a character building experience - the supervisor didn't like me, I wasn't getting paid well, and I wasn't even eating well. Ramen doesn't make for a good meal on a daily basis. Damn my stubborn attitude.

So I left this company after being fired ("The company is changing its focus," she said), went to work for about three weeks in August of 1996 with Orange Micro (was fired from there for not following directions I wasn't actually given), and in September I went to work for Sanders Engineering. Right before this, I took a graveyard position at the 76 station off of Fairlynn, and right before that, I worked a night at the Mattel distribution warehouse in Industry - but I digress. Sanders was responsible for, amongst other things, the ductwork and air conditioning systems throughout the Red Line subway in Los Angeles. I was assigned to do some project clerical work for a Kaiser pharmacy distribution center in Norwalk, given the title of "assistant administrative aide" (read: slave), and laid off in 1998.

I spent much of the year 1998 owing about $250 in taxes to the IRS and the FTB and between temp jobs; in September, I got a job at the Circle K off of Richfield and Orangethorpe, and stayed there for a few months before moving to the location off of Rose and Alta Vista in January of 1999 and working primarily the graveyard shift.

I remained there until the beginning of July, when I resigned for a better paying job at Bergen Brunswig, a pharmaceuticals distributor. (Yeah, OK, "drug dealer".) From July 1999 to March of 2000, I was a temp with them; I was hired in March finally, stayed on until February of 2002, and dismissed from there - and shortly thereafter took a job with this company called Legal Tax Defenders Group.

As much as I don't like to talk about working for LTD, I'll say this - it was a character builder. Big time. There are things I won't talk about here, but what I will say is this: working for a drug addict is not an experience I would wish on anybody. The owner of the now dead company is a drug addict that I watched move from heroin to methadone to cocaine and derivatives (crack cocaine) over the course of two years, and it was after he started on coke that he stopped making payroll on time consistently. (Before this, consistency in payroll was anything but a problem.) I was fired in June 2004 for "stealing from the company". I've long since given up trying to figure out exactly what I stole from that man. Then again, when you're hooked on coke, everyone's out to get you anyway.

So that bit of unpleasantness aside, from June to December of 2004, I worked for a mortgage broker named George Grachen. The idea is that he would train me how to process mortgage loans - but the problem is that when you're processing loans yourself, you don't really have the time to train somebody to do so. Now, as much as I respected this man, there are little things I don't much care for about him that I'm not going to talk about here. I'll just say that we parted ways, and not on good terms - I wasn't profitable, and we started to get on each others' nerves.

So I took some time off, working for one day with Volt Services Group at their offices in Orange (that didn't go well - they didn't really effectively train me in what needed to be done), and started working as a temp for FedEx in January 2005. I started there at the Anaheim world service center, transferred to Lake Forest, and was hired on for FedEx Kinko's in April. (To explain, FedEx bought Kinko's in 2002, and all of the FedEx WSCs were turned into FedEx Kinko's Shipping Centers as of 04Apr2005.) After working for a month and a half at the one near John Wayne Airport, I transferred to the one at the western end of Garden Grove. In March of 2006, however, I left there. I don't wish to talk about that, but I'll say this - it was getting old. I kind of miss the company, but looking around, I think I'm worth a bit more than what they were paying me (higher-end standard retail slave wage).

After moving to the greater Seattle area, I spent a few months doing some temp work before starting at a call center, doing data support for T-Mobile. This ended in early 2010, sort of - I had moved to a contract for Google, before that was ended and I moved to Speakeasy.

Speakeasy was regretfully short lived - the company was in the midst of a merger when I started, and two days later, the merger completed - and it was noted that my job would move to Canada. The only person out of my class still there was a gentleman named Jason, and he still likes it, from what I gather.

In 2011, I returned to school for two years and finished in 2013.

In 2013, I went to work for a company called support.com. This is best described as the technicians one gets in touch with when it really *is* something on your computer. My job was initially guiding people in fixing their wireless internet connections; this would later graduate to doing software fixes on the end user computers. All of this was contracted by Comcast, and was a premium service that ended at the end of 2013.

In early 2014, I interviewed at F5 Networks, and was offered the job immediately after the interview; I have been there since March of 2014. F5 is, in a nutshell, a company that makes stuff that prevents the internet from falling apart. It's far more complex than just that, but we'll leave it there. Suffice it to say, I no longer deal directly with the end users. I started as a technical support coordinator (in a nutshell, sort of a triage nurse for the support engineers), moved on to providing some general support for the lab racks, and as of 2017 I am now one of the support engineers that I was supporting as a TSC.


© Dennis Carr - all rights reserved
Last modified Sat Jul 29 2017 01:18:45 PDT