[astroglide]

busboy at caleco's sportsbar. fired for doing michael bolton impressions. there's a club in the basement and the music blares through it. i was holding butter packets up to my eyes when they were playing "when a man loves a woman" after hours. i screamed when he hit the high notes and squeezed the butter packets like my eyes were exploding, and when i pulled them away i saw a manager standing in front of me.

dishwasher at river star cafe restaurant. quit with no notice to work at quiktrip.

clerk at quiktrip. fired as described in another post.

rock and roll hardee's. fired for being a generally crappy employee, i hated the environment. note i was in the "work study" program in high school. i took 3 hours, french 4, psychology, and marketing. then i had to work. if you get quit or get fired from work, you fail the work study and don't get credits. you also can't go to work if you miss school and vice-versa. my teachers were somehow aware of my fairly abysmal home situation though and apparently took great pity on me.

jack in the box. i was a rock star at this place. i was going to quit in order to work at best buy, but they offered me a $2 raise. so i got like $7-$8/hr, which was what a shift leader would make. but i could run every side of the place and was an awesome employee. management changed 80 times and i eventually just didn't show up for work one day and technically got fired, although i consider it a quit.

best buy. started in pc sales, bluffed my way into pc tech. i knew software, not hardware. as a fraternizing type thing when i was "checking out the area" with a manager before joining i was handed a pair of pliers and asked to pull a jumper on something. i had no idea what to do and didn't do anything, but claimed it was dark or something and got through it. i learned all the hardware stuff fast and ended up the lead tech within a few months after the existing one left. got fired for being totally uninterested in helping any other department (especially customer service) when i had run through my workload.

started doing consulting after that. big pay jump to like $15-$20/hr. did some interesting things but the work wasn't steady.

tech support at an isp. dialup at the time still, windows 95 was still relatively new. i ended up getting a proxy server installed in the tech room before i left because i was doing denial of service attacks on people over irc with the ultra broadband (DS3) connection. ended up helping a manager of an upcoming compusa over the phone and met with him for lunch, he offered me more money with commission so i quit.

compusa i was the lead tech. different from best buy because it was a lot bigger tech center, and the store was computer-focused. i got something like 10 per hour OR commission. i would get 25% of all labor. if it ended up being higher than 10/hr, i would earn all commission. i ended up doing that regularly and making a good salary. this is also where i met/befriended a blues hockey player and ended up knowing and doing side work for lots of hockey players as well as other misc rich people. quit to get my first 'real job' at a software development company as a network admin for 52k. this was around 1999, so i was 21 or 22 years old.

worked there for a year. ended up being the main network admin since my peer moved to a different department. company exploded dot com style and hired 47894367 people, then in equally dot com style it got taken over and had the staff reduced by 66%. i survived the chops and would have continued to survive but the environment was abysmal so i just quit. i also didn't pay for my stock options in time so i got no stock, but that turned out to not be a big deal financially.

did nothing for a while. bought/sold sun computer equipment on ebay, started playing and losing at paradisepoker. did a couple consulting jobs. one was as a tech writer for linux admin certfication programs (like the MCSE of linux). i wrote really well when i actually worked, but i would often "work from home" and "not actually do anything." another half quit/fire situation.

i piddled around and ran through my datek account and etc, just scraping by doing side work for rich people and that sort of thing. very much the low point of my life but i have very fond memories of the period. gf and i broke up, ended up getting evicted from my townhouse. moved in with 2+2's own senor choppy and mooched off of him for an entire year. played poker seriously during this period, actually developed poker skills. paid senor choppy off mostly by way of a lot of $50 -> $1000 50 cent 1 dollar to 20 40 runups.

life kind of took off for me from there. had 4 "major clients" and was making a fair living with a side business. i could have gone with that and built it into something but the job offer i got was too good. scored current gf of 4 years, got my current great job which i've held in good standing since then, started doing very well at poker, etc.

i've got tons of misc stories from consulting jobs so you could say i've worked at more places than that, and it's possible i've entirely forgotten several employers.