Job 3.0: A failure leading to success

I got married and moved to Birmingham Alabama.  I signed up to sell encyclopedias door to door (by choice) because I thought it would be an interesting experience - it was!  Encyclopedia Britannica had an excellent sales training program at the time.  I was mildly successful, but not enough to actually live on.  I programmed at home on a PC/XT for fun in off hours. This was more of an experiment than a job.  I gained some people skills but learned that I really enjoy the technical things more than the people things.

Six months latter I was about two months from being broke and decided to go back to programming.  An interesting thing happened again.  

1) There was exactly one company in town that was using the type of computer I was most experienced with ("DEC" VAX/VMS).  

2) They had six programmers and a huge project due to a customer in six weeks. 

3) Two of the programmers turned in their two-week notice one week ago.  I called the company and got connected with the head programmer and invited to interview.   

It was like a turkey shoot where the turkeys are in small cages.  “Can you start tomorrow?” he asked.  That was funny. 

It turns out that the project they were programming was very similar to the student information system at school; it was 30% done and they thought it was 70% done (that's why twp others left; jumping ship before things got ugly), and I not only hit the track running; I created a new track.  Those were interesting years - the early nineties.  PCs were becoming more popular and the company is sales driven so they wanted to sell them, but the product is industry specific; meaning that it's massive and filled with thousands of industry and business specific pieces of logic.  So it's not practical to "write a new one" when computers change or new languages are in vogue.  The most computer intensive part of the product was (and still is) an operational display that helps a dispatcher track and schedule trucks.  

 It's a brilliant design (information management) by one of the founders of the company from 1988.  I created a version that would run on a PC to offload processing from the VAX computer.  Then I coupled the new display and a terminal control program with a multiple session capability and exceptional response time.  Operations that used to take two minutes would now take 1.5 seconds; the customers loved it.  We called it ZNET.

That was phase one of my third job.  Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, and others inspired me.  My hobby (besides programming) was golfing with co-workers (future executives).