Bills, Viruses, and Naivety: The Chronicles of Employee 2.0
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.