Attila Olbrich.

So, back into the grind I went. Bills weren’t paying themselves, and unfortunately, my “Your invoice entered a lottery and didn’t win this month” excuse wasn’t impressing utility companies. What now? Time to earn some cash while keeping things interesting.

During my teaching escapades, I wasn’t exactly twiddling my thumbs—I was keeping up with the tech revolution. DOS was yesterday’s news, Windows was king, and the internet wasn’t something you could rely on 24/7. We connected only when we needed to, and boy, did we make those dial-up minutes count.

I explored every tech avenue I could: Visual Basic, FoxPro, C, C++, and my personal favorite—Borland Delphi. Why Delphi? It was like the Swiss Army knife of business app development. I experimented with dBase, BDE, SQL servers like InterBase and MySQL, and even dabbled with viruses—strictly for fun and personal amusement, of course. My most devious creation? A self-replicating virus confined to a test environment. It wasn’t called COVID, and no, it didn’t escape.

I even built a basic operating system boot loader just because I could. You know, for those lazy Sunday afternoons when Netflix wasn’t a thing.

Back to Reality

With my toolbox brimming with nerdy goodness, I started job hunting. After a few applications, bam, I got a callback. The job? Working for a car parts wholesale company. Not huge, but interesting—specializing in French car parts (bonjour, Peugeot!).

My First Mission: The Catalogue

The first project involved creating an installable catalogue for garages to browse parts, build their orders, and send them over via dial-up. The existing one was prehistoric, and my new boss was ecstatic about the upgrade. He even shared a hilarious tidbit about the previous developer, who spent months making diagrams but never wrote a single line of code. I took the opposite approach: less doodles, more delivery.

Then Came the Invoicing Beast

Next up? Rewrite the entire invoicing and stock management system. Piece of cake, right? Using MySQL, I built a connected system that linked the catalogue software, internal shops, and more. It became a sprawling, efficient masterpiece. As word spread, a larger car parts distributor came knocking, but company politics kept me from joining.

What I did gain, though, was a crash course in database optimization. Their German database was a behemoth—millions of rows, hyper-normalized tables, and razor-thin performance margins. My kind of challenge.

Side Hustles and Sucker Punches

Programming 9-to-5 wasn’t enough for my restless brain, so I took on side gigs. I developed a management system for two driving schools—each different, naturally—and built software for a language school.

Now, about that language school: I delivered the software, refined it, and installed it across all their workstations. When I presented the invoice, the secretary said, “Oh, the boss decided not to pay, but thanks for the install!” Classic. Lesson learned (again).

The Big Side Hustle Tease

One of my side gigs became massive, but it’s too juicy to squeeze in here. Let’s just say it involved migrating a DOS invoicing system to Windows and adding a heap of new features. Stay tuned for Chapter 6—because the web was about to take over.

And that’s how I transitioned back into the employee market: wiser, slightly poorer (thanks, language school), and armed with a growing arsenal of tech tricks. The road ahead was paved with more challenges, plenty of laughs, and perhaps a pinch of naivety.