First day on the job - Bank of America

It was January 9th, 1989 and time to go to work. I had graduated in May of 1988 with a computer science degree and after several months of job searching, landed in the Entry Level Training program at Bank of America. The previous Friday, I moved out of my parents house packing second hand household goods into my 1969 Dodge Dart. I have no recall of how I spent that first weekend. I do remember going shopping at Safeway on Friday night and getting a frozen pizza. Cooking the frozen pizza only to realize I didn’t have oven mitts nor a knife to cut it with.

First day on the job - MechanicNet

It was early 2003 and my old boss, former Internet Image CEO Lung Tsai called me. I answered on my Sprint One feature phone. He was trying to recruit me to his new company, MechanicNet. It was small - 10ish full time employees. They had some big deals lined up and needed a Director of Engineering. It would pay 90-95K USD plus stock options. I was making double that as a contract programmer at the time, so I politely declined. It was nice to feel wanted and my ego liked the title.

The Kirby Wiese Question

Early in my career, my mentor was a wonderful woman named Maria Wiese. She was married to Kirby Wiese and he was “a guy”. “A guy” in that he had a strong technical and leadership skills. While I didn’t get to work with Kirby much since I was in the sequestered VM/CMS systems group, I knew of his reputation. He knew things. One day I found myself in his office. I don’t recall exactly why, maybe it was to ask a question, maybe he saw me on the floor and asked me in. I have a strong impression of his office. Large (for tech), perfectly rectangular, with a large desk centered in the room. He sat behind the desk, also centered, and we exchanged some small talk. I was young and despite my obvious limitations was performing really well. It was possible I could eventually become “a guy”. A Kirby Wiese.

The Paper Route Years

Two bundles of papers dropped in the driveway. My elder brother Matt would bring them into the “new room” and fold them (the “new room” was a converted garage my parents had made into an extra room for the house).

Fold them meant roll them and place a rubber band around the paper. Or slide them into a plastic bag if it might rain. He’d load the papers into a cart for delivery purposes. An early aside is needed for the cart. The cart was a 1970’s era supermarket cart. A big, metal crate on rubberized wheels. Something like this: