Schulz Nissan for a One Year commitment #

The year was 1987, and things were going okay for us with Wurdsand Inc., but my Dad and brother where in a bind and needed my help for one year. My Dad had split off from the initial company that he started and sold his shares to my cousin and started a new dealership with my brother. They built a brand new showroom on a piece of property that was part of the deal splitting from Schulz Motors. The problem that they had was that they needed an accountant for a year as my sister was still in college for one more year studying business administration and accounting and she would then take over.

This was a bit of a problem as David and I even had some established and regular work that was coming into Wurdsand Inc and I was the only one that was able to run the press. Being that it was just going to be a year we would split the equipment up. David would take the camera and development equipment so he would furnish me with the negatives and I would move the plate burner, light table, and press to Barrhead and set it up inside my Dad’s garage. This worked okay as either my Dad or someone would be in Edmonton every other day so they would pickup any negatives that David shot and I would print them up. I think that David must have also ordered the paper and send that along with the rest of the order. Then when I completed the job, we would send the product back through the same channels. If something need to be cut like business cards, David would take them down to Nicks and do that.

Well, that one year turned into five years, as when my sister came back she helped for a while in accounting but her heart wasn’t in it. She would rather help the customers out on the parts desk. In fact she went back to college but as an apprentice where she would work for a year and go to school for a month or so. I continued being the accountant. One thing I should mention was that this was around 1987 that this all started and I wanted to start right from the beginning to computerize the operation. At this time I really did not know what to buy or how I was going to start. However, I did know that what would really be driving this is the software, so I went to the software house to see what they had in accounting software. My only experience with computers at this time was with my toy ZX90, the mainframe terminal from Ford, and the Apple MacIntosh which we used for all our typesetting.

When I walked into The Software House (that was what it was called), they showed me that this little area was Atari, over in that corner was Apple, and the rest (3/4) of the store was PC software. Needless to say I found a pretty cool software package, don’t remember the name of it but it ran on a PC and my next step was to go a find a PC. I almost think it was a Sear store or some sort of department store and I bought my first PC computer. Then the studying began, because I knew nothing about these things but slowly I figured it all out. This was not connected to any network, and the internet was not widely used or available to most places.