Prompt
Your first job can teach important lessons that guide you in your career journey. What was your first job and what made it memorable?
💼 My first job was a summer internship (paid) at the Point Lepreau nuclear plant in New Brunswick. I had gone to Shad Valley for the first month of the summer, sponsored by NB Power, and got to pick where to work for the remaining six weeks.
My first day of work, I had to get a radiation dosimeter, and the person filling out the computer form looked up at me when the screen turned red and said, "You're not 18!" And I said, "I know."
The thing that I most remember all these years later was how SLOW the computers were.
I was working on editing the flow chart for the shutdown systems for the plant, and it was an E-sized drawing in AutoCAD... every now and then it would spontaneously re-render in the middle of the work day, which would cause a cry of "noooooo!" because it took 45 minutes.
I had to make up tasks that I could still do while the computer was churning so that I wasn't just staring off into space. I did an inventory of the computers on site (because there wasn't a central repository) and I remember standing and looking at one with a 40 MB hard drive and saying, "What are you going to do with that much memory?"
Because the commute was long by local standards (an hour each way) everybody car pooled, and the work week was set up to work 9 out of 10 days, with alternate Fridays off. I was on an opposite schedule from the rest of the team I was working with, so on Fridays I had several computers available... so I would set up all four computers in a set of cubicles with various tasks on them, and when one of them was hung up rendering or sending a job to print (oh, the dreaded "time out on package read" at 98% transmission!) I could jump to another one and keep getting some work done.
(This was before the internet. It was a high security environment. There was work or there was other work.)
#summerinternship #firstjob #nuclearpower #slowcomputers #80stech
Your first job can teach important lessons that guide you in your career journey. What was your first job and what made it memorable?
💼 My first job was a summer internship (paid) at the Point Lepreau nuclear plant in New Brunswick. I had gone to Shad Valley for the first month of the summer, sponsored by NB Power, and got to pick where to work for the remaining six weeks.
My first day of work, I had to get a radiation dosimeter, and the person filling out the computer form looked up at me when the screen turned red and said, "You're not 18!" And I said, "I know."
The thing that I most remember all these years later was how SLOW the computers were.
I was working on editing the flow chart for the shutdown systems for the plant, and it was an E-sized drawing in AutoCAD... every now and then it would spontaneously re-render in the middle of the work day, which would cause a cry of "noooooo!" because it took 45 minutes.
I had to make up tasks that I could still do while the computer was churning so that I wasn't just staring off into space. I did an inventory of the computers on site (because there wasn't a central repository) and I remember standing and looking at one with a 40 MB hard drive and saying, "What are you going to do with that much memory?"
Because the commute was long by local standards (an hour each way) everybody car pooled, and the work week was set up to work 9 out of 10 days, with alternate Fridays off. I was on an opposite schedule from the rest of the team I was working with, so on Fridays I had several computers available... so I would set up all four computers in a set of cubicles with various tasks on them, and when one of them was hung up rendering or sending a job to print (oh, the dreaded "time out on package read" at 98% transmission!) I could jump to another one and keep getting some work done.
(This was before the internet. It was a high security environment. There was work or there was other work.)
#summerinternship #firstjob #nuclearpower #slowcomputers #80stech