Continued

The year was now 1999 and I had been working at the Union Pacific for two years. There were rumors of the St. Louis location being moved to Omaha and I deciced to look elsewhere for gainful employment. It was at this time that I made a significant career change.

I had wanted to get out of hardware and software support and move into web design for a living. So to make that happen, I interviewed for a job in St. Peters with a Coop for a position as an ASP programmer. At this point, my only experience was having taken several classes in VB. ASP is just VB script, so I went to the interview, gave them all the right answers and left the interview at 3 to be back at the RR by 4:30.

At 5 the phone rang and the Coop offered me the job. It came with a nice increase in salary, my only problem was that I was still not proficient coding ASP. This was a minor problem, so I bought a book titled "Teach Yourself ASP in 24 Hours". I spent three uninterrupted days working with the examples. By the time I reported for the first day on the job, I knew enough to keep my head above water and keep the boss happy.

My father had worked as a used car salesman in the 1950s and even though I never knew him, there must have been something in the genes. I learned very quickly and in weeks I was pumping out code with the best of them.

One of the most important lessons I learned in this industry is that nothing stays the same for very long.

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