WeirDave's Castle - Employment

E-mail: admin @ weirdave.com

Employment

Current and Historical

 

I am currently employed as a Field Technician VI for Spectrum Networks that bought out Brighthouse Networks in 2015. My worklife since then has gone downhill. I was the Wireless Networking Specialist for Bright House Networks. My job didn't pay extremely well but it had pretty good benefits. I was there 16 years and I was one of the rare few that could say they liked their job not so much now. I am actively trying to find an exit strategy.

Over the course of my lifetime, I have held many different kinds of jobs. My philosophy, which I learned from my grandmother, was that you really can't talk about how a job has been completed or how someone is performing at that job until you've actually done the job yourself. She also went on to say that you'll never know what, job you're going to like if you never try it. This is the same philosophy she would hand down to all of us regarding food choices. Fortunately for me this line of thinking really sunk in. I started working when I was 14 with a work permit. This is mostly out of necessity since my mother was an education and raising my sister and I as a single income household. My first job was as a stock person, front counter, and general sales person at  Toy King. I really didn't particularly care for the job itself, the girl I work for was rather cute though and I think that's what made me stick with it, well that and the money that I would get in order to subsidize my videogame habit. I would move from that job to a department store called J Byron's. My capacity for that store was to work the electronics department, little did I know that I was already hooked on gear. I didn't really like it though and discover the retail was really not what I enjoyed. Mostly, actually, I truly hated it. To me, having to keep busy by straightening things that were already straight or dusting things that didn't need to be dusted is really not my line of work. I worked at that job for about a year when I landed a job at The Bradford's Coach House Restaurant as a bus boy. Now there's a job. I remember helping my asked cleaning tables, running food, dishwashing when it was backed up, bringing ice for the bar, and pretty much anything that anybody required that no one else wanted to do I think. Still all in all, I really enjoyed it. Plus, I found out that in this line of work harder you work the more money you earn, that, is a pretty cool thing.

IBM and Apple traditional logos

After that restaurant was sold off my mother employed me to work as a teachers assistant in her preschool that she owned called Seven Gables. I handled the two and four-year-olds and pretty much had fun with all of them. I have fond memories of jumping in the sandbox with the kids and playing on the swings and slides and the ginormous sewage pipe on it's side that you could climb on and hang upside down from. I worked there for four years on and off and also during that time I was a coach at several city Parks and Recreation programs, however the most impactful job during that period was my job at the Computer Centre. it was a third-party company out of  Bradenton, Florida that landed a contract with IBM and Apple to attempt to sell personal computers in a department store. The store was Maas Brothers downtown St. Petersburg. We were located on the third floor next to the credit department. The computers at the time were the very first Apple Macintosh's and IBM's 8080. they cost around $15,000, and with my enthusiasm, and the subsequent sales that followed, I quickly became the assistant manager of the store. Unfortunately, having no real monetary guidance from anyone I did not take the stock options or purchase any stock at that time. Life sure would've been different had I bought even 10 shares, but alas, it wasn't meant to be. It did however, spur my great love of computers.

After that job I tried several restaurants, a movie theater, working for the state in the children's education program, and I opened up Cha-Cha Coconuts at the pier in downtown St. Petersburg. After turning 21, I landed my first job working at a nightclub, it was called the Baja Beach club in Tampa Florida. This would be the start of my dancing and lighting career. I had a resident jobs at the Cuda Bay Club in Orlando, the Mako's Bay Club in Tampa, Jammin'z Dance Shack, Clearwater Beach, the Calypso Bay club, Clearwater, and The Red Zone in Tampa. I also started my own club with funding from the parent club, which was called Club 911. It was an alternative club and it did pretty well until I left to go to Orlando in 1990, then things began to gradually slip away for that establishment. It Orlando of course is when I landed my work on MTV, but that's another story.

When I finally decided to settle down, after hearing that I was going to be a father, I tried my taste at corporate life as a temp employee doing random computer jobs all over the Bay Area. At one point, I was working two full-time jobs. I was working nights of the club and I would go home change into my uniform and come to work as the Burger King drive-through morning guy. Although I enjoyed working and even being a temporary employee along the way, I knew that there was no future in this type of employment. I tried my hand at becoming my own business owner for a little while, handling computer repair and the like, I even carried that business on to do sound, light and video, installation, service and repair but to be quite honest that's not the lifestyle that I was really looking for. I worked at Quarterdeck software, first as a salesperson, then as a product manager for product called clean sweep. The company was subsequently bought by Symantec and I was offered a job to be a product manager for that product plus another product and continue my work, but I would be required to move to Cupertino California. I turned it down after discovering that the pay, even though it was four times what I was making here, was really a lowball figure for living out there.

I was unemployed for six months in 1998 and then I started working again as a temp, when, after some serious recruiting, I was offered a position at Raymond James in St. Petersburg. I worked there exactly one week.  The position was a training executive where I would travel all across the country and set up new Raymond James franchises. They spent gobs of money on getting me set up for traveling and all that goes with that, plus the usual laptop cell phone etc. then the woman that would be my supervisor, ended up firing me. She didn't give a reason and it infuriated the people who had spent all the money, time, and resources recruiting me to begin with. In fact, it made them so angry that they held a board meeting just for me and agreed to give me a severance package plus allow me to collect unemployment. Crazy.

After that I held a seasonal job for Hickory Farms before returning to work in the light, sound, and video business again. This time forming a partnership with my friend Curtis and his company, High-Energy. I worked with him for a little over a year and a half when I landed a job that would start my career. The company was called American Compusystems and they were a contractor for Time Warner Cable. They had a new project, an Internet service startup called Roadrunner and I was to be their main technician. Duties would include, handling installation and service for new customers and existing customers along the way. I enjoyed that job for three years, and loved every minute of it, well except for the taxes, which I tried to tackle on my own every year. I kept wishing that there was some way I can work directly for Time Warner and it benefits too, but they were not hiring. Then, I got my break when I found out that I could get in the company through the customer service/support department working on the phones. I took it. And that pretty much brings us to the beginning of this page. If you'd like a chronological list that makes more sense, head over to the resume section. And, if you've read this far, I love ya!

I have a copy of my actual work history in the Resume section of this website.