Saturday, September 10, 2011

Temporary job for a day

I had the opportunity to work as a temp at a computer repair shop yesterday. I worked a full shift. (9 a.m. to 6 p.m.) It was really cool. I'll try to tell the story from beginning to end.

I arrived at the computer repair shop 20 minutes early. I was really nervous. I had tried the door a few times but had been locked. I was just sitting in my car looking inside. I could see that there was a sales floor and back doors - most likely lead to where I would be working. I just sat there forever it seemed. I was praying and hoping today would be awesome. Of course it would be. Finally someone came to unlock the door. I went in and introduced myself as Brandon Burch. He simply said OK. I thought to myself, well he doesn't know who I am. So I quickly told him that I was to be working as a temporary today.

After parking in the back and going in the back door, I was led into the back room where all the workbenches were. I was introduced to the head-technician. He showed me around and gave me a run down of everything they did throughout the day. Basically, all day I installed updates on computers that have been restarted from scratch (as they called it "freshing" computers). It was fun just being around the computers. There was one time during the day, when we installed dual monitors for the computers in the back office. That was pretty fun. They also were recycling old school computers, ya know, the really heavy ones. I loaded about 20 into the back of a van.

By this time it was 5:00 PM. The director called me into the owner's office where they would interview me before leaving for the day at 6:00. They asked me about my resume, my interests, how I liked it today, and I just talking to me they found out my personalities. There were glad that I have good communication skills and wasn't afraid to talk to people. It was then I referred to my YouTube channel where I give guitar lessons. It was cool because the owner expressed interest in what I did and how I got my guitar sound through the computer. I explained the interface and POD Farm through USB connection, and said it sounded pretty good. They said they would like to consider me for a position, but they had no current openings. They mentioned that Rance had said that I would make a good employee, I was eager to do whatever he told me to do, and was willing to learn the business. I just need some experience to help me along. I was very surprised to hear that he said school is not really going to teach you anything that you will need to know for the business.

You learn basically everything here at work. He told me about one employee - how he had gone to school for computer repair. He got a degree and when he got out and came to work, he didn't really know anything about the business. It was just all textbook and theory stuff. I was kind of shocked because everybody is talking about how important is to go to college. But this actually proved my dad right: you really learn everything at work - on-the-job training. Granted, it might be hard to get a job because I don't have a bachelor's degree, but there's really no sense in wasting money going to college if I can get a good job with a two year degree. There are some people there on the job that are still paying off a student loan. I say, if you can make it with a two year degree: go for it!

The owner told the director that I just need somebody to give me a chance. Even though they could not pay me for future times, I could work as an intern if I wished. If I ever felt like working there as an intern I would just call up and a they could find a time to use me; and just to get some experience to put on a resume. Heck, I got some experience this day and got paid to boot! I really think I made a good impression on these people and I think they enjoyed my company. This is what I'd strived for very much so. The only thing I would change is all the cursing I heard all day long. I know this is just the world but it was bothersome nonetheless. I just turned on the Christian radio station as I traveled home. LOL.

It was so cool to talk with computer gurus. These guys were the pros and I could ask them questions and get instant answers. I found out that my hard drive in my laptop is defective because it had clicked one time before. That explains why my computer is slow. It has gotten slower and slower throughout the months. My computer is slowly dying. That is why I'm backing up my files again today. When my birthday rolls around on September 20, I'm going to use that money to buy a new hard drive for my computer. This is going to cost me around $70. I can't wait to spend this kind of money because it's gonna be well worth it. My computer is really ticking me off with its slowness! It so hard to record audio for my songs and produce videos. It's so hard to do multi-tasking. It has a 2.1 processor and 4 GB of ram. There's no way in this world it should be as sluggish as it is. I have wiped the computer twice already and it still messes up. So is very obvious that it has something physically wrong with it.

Something else that I learned from the computer gurus is multiple virus scanning programs installed on your computer actually do fight with each other. You need to have one virus scanning program. This is contrary to something I had heard from a student at school.

All in all, this day was so awesome! I thank God for the opportunity I had in working there.


-Brandon

1 comment:

  1. That is really cool Brandon!
    Oh, I recently did a system restore on my poor ol' Dell, and it now runs faster. It looked like I had extra programs running in the background that made things smaller. I mean slower.
    And I just had an 8-bit image of two virus programs literally fighting each other in a computer. Hee hee

    ReplyDelete