What was your first job out of college?

Pumping gas. It was interesting because it was sort of like the show "Cheers" with the repeat customers and all of the weird personalities.

Went to graduate school and ended up making a lot more money and retired early. The gas station was actually more fun, but no money there.

Why do you ask?

Working at a text style mill in the electrical department where I became the EE and thus upgraded the antique machines with modern electronics thus, removing many of the hardware dependent apertures of the machines. Things were not as easy as they are now for electronic controls and special devices. Back then, you had to design and build a lot of your component assemblies in house. Doing the mechanical hardware engineering was up to the machinists, which we had some very talented people working there.

Then we graduated in to designing complete pieces of equipment etc. Got a better job offer and then moved out of that state.

That was over 20 years ago. Now we work at a facility that not only has a production operation going on continuously, they also have a EE, ME department with a large machine and electronics work area for staging of new equipment, maintenance and upgrades of existing.

We design and modify equipment that is used through out the rest of our other locations.

We also do lots of military, some special and some generic. In many cases, we have to design special devices to get the process of these exotic products properly assembled and tested.

In between all of that, I had a several side adventures doing embedded micro processor, analog devices where they were used in products related mostly to computer interfaces and submitted many to electronic manufactures. Now since every thing on that line is made in China., that end of it has gone belly up..

Jamie wrote: (snip)

(snip) > Now we work at a facility (snip)

(snip)

(snip)

How many are you? ;-)

...

A "text style" mill? Is that, say, as opposed to a "graphics style" mill?

You wouldn't mean "textile", would you? ;-)

Thanks, Rich

How many? what's that suppose to mean? Ok, I miss used the term "WE" with "I".. I apologize.! English grammar was never my strong point, even though it's my native tongue. That's why I throw my reports over to the secretary for review before I submit them. After all, they are an appliance aren't they ? :)

Hmm, looks like i'm not paying much attention to my spell checker. guess I shouldn't be using the auto function. And I thought it was such a good feature.

yes, you are correct, Textile mill. (years ago).

Thanks for bringing this little error up. I just turned off the auto function.

I wonder how many other post i've made lately like that with out first proof reading it.! Oh well.

Bye for now.

'Textile'

No, they aren't, and they shouldn't have to do your work.

became

mill?

For this sort of typo the spell checker is no good since both words, "text" and "style", are valid, and spelled correctly.

do wonder how many military projects documents have been released with correct spell but with completely non contextual content?

mill?

Well, if that was the case, she'd be out of a job.

It sounds like they should keep her and get rid of you, if she's doing both jobs.

Electronics design engineer. Same thing as I've always done. It's been fun so far.

John

AFAICT, the issue is that the spell-checker didn't just detect the typo, but tried to fix it (incorrectly).

My guess is that the original was something like "textyle".

Auto-correction is usually a bad idea. For anything other than the most obvious typos (e.g. "teh"), not only is the chance of the replacement being wrong high, but an incorrect replacement is likely to be more confusing than if the original typo had been left intact.

Oh well, No one is complaining. And no, she doesn't do my job, she does what she was hired for.

You said she was doing your work.

While I went to college, I worked at the same company where my father worked, and I was variously employed as a draftsman/illustrator, technical writer (for a military manual), and QC inspector. When I left college, I worked at this same place as a draftsman, at a very low hourly wage. I often helped one of the other draftsmen to do his job, and when I found out he was making about twice what I was, I asked for a raise. It was refused, because the personnel director said that the other draftsman had a family to support, while I was still living at home and didn't need the money. IIRC, I quit immediately.

So, I found a job supervising newspaper boys selling new subscriptions, at a higher pay than I was getting, and then I found a better job as a draftsman again at a job-shop. Their contract ended and I enjoyed unemployment for 26 weeks.

Three years out of college, after also running a part-time TV/stereo repair business, I got a "real" job as an instrument technician, and about three years later, I became an electronics design engineer, which was what I always wanted to do. The company was sold 15 years later, to a company in Dallas, but I didn't want to relocate (or work for them), so in 1989 I started my own business in electronic design

Paul

I had some very interesting adventures in the early 70s, that were much more educational and rewarding than a boring 9-5 job. I had originally planned to work as an instrument tech for a while to get enough money to set up a shop for self-employment, but the job got more interesting and it was good to have a steady income, so I finally entered the corporate mainstream.

Paul

On Sep 28, 3:30 am, "Michael A. Terrell" wrote in part:

I tend to agree with Michael. In my mind no matter what job one does one should be professional enough to be able to communicate effectively and accurately in at least one language.

For most of us that is English; sadly too like most I have no other language capability which is certainly a limitation. With time back would certainly have learnt French or maybe Spanish. Although the way the world is developing Chines or Farsi (India) might be better but much more difficult for a westerner (and an older one at that) to learn even a smattering.

That doesn't mean we don't all, occasionally, in haste, misspell a word or don't use 'Spell-check' correctly. But bad sentence construction etc. only obfuscates and tells the reader that YOU don't communicate very well!

For example: I had a graduate engineer working for me at one time who couldn't write even to follow a pre-set format. We (myself and other managers) wondered how he ever passed his engineering courses. We gave him a low performance review for that and other reasons and he eventually straightened himself out.

These days much communication is direct (email, MSN, ng postings etc.) i.e. no secretarial involvement at all, such as this item that I type and post myself. Must spell check it before sending and read over to spot the worst of any grammatical errors.

Criticism welcomed. Always willing to learn.