Life After College #

Time to start earning some money. That summer I was planning to go back to Barrhead but by then Rodney and his whole family had moved into Moms house and Connie and Terry took over the bottom part of the house, there was no room for me so I rented an apartment in the Northgate area of Edmonton in one of my Uncle Fred’s apartment. Found out that the family discount was a free parking spot.

Getting a job or people to hire me was harder than I expected. I would apply for a job and during the interview they would determine that I was over qualified for the job that they had posted and were sure that I would become bored. However, once in a while they would tell me about a special project that they wanted to build and ask me my opinion and I would give them a couple of ideas of how I would approach the project and then they would say, “Can you start Monday”. I got a lot of contracting jobs and so the fake company that I created in College for my assignments became a reality. I worked under the name of “DL’s Technology” It sort of uses the same template of a logo that I today used for my “The Donald Schulz Project” but that is going to be a couple of decades forward.

I would also get programing projects through Grant MacEwan College as when an outsider would call the college for someone to do any kind of programming I was the only one that they recommended. I had a fun time working on some applications for the Cross Cancer Institute. The personal assistant to the director was out for several months because of a skiing accident. The other secretaries just took on her responsibilities and it was the savings of her salary that funded my time over there. I was automating a lot of the data collection that would happen in all the departments and produce a live chart of activities. There were a number of things like this that the Personal Assistant would do and I basically automated them. When she came back she was able to move more into the IT department which is what she has wanted to do but these things that I automated for her were keeping her too busy to do that. Also while I was there Dr. Jane Schulz was doing some intern work there so we had lunch together a couple of times.

The beginning of my big break came when a software company that had worked with the Interprovincial Pipelines had a project that needed to be written in Visual Basic and they were essentially a Delphi shop and thought they would have time to learn Visual Basic and build this but it was way beyond them and the deadline was approaching. I took this one and did two projects for them all for Interprovincial Pipelines. One was this hugh project that involved several vendors writing different parts that were all driven by a single menu system. They all had to communitat to this auto cad program to show where on the pipeline the fault occured. I was given the specifications and followed them to the letter. When it was time to confirm the interface from what my program sent and what they received they scheduled a whole week for this. I brought my computers to their shop (this was before the days of programming on laptops) and because I followed and worked my program to follow the specifications I was provided, I was done by noon of that first day.

One of the big things that this Software company did, maybe even the bigger part of their business was building custom computers. They had a deal with some hardware vendor and get the parts and put together complete systems. I somehow got a contract to build an entire system for a dentist’s office. Couple of computers, printer, scanner. The sad thing was he got broken into and the computers were stolen so with the insurance money we did the whole order again. The reason I bring this up is that while I was sub contracting and working with these guys I met Adrian who was using them as a supplier of computers for his clients. Knowing about my programming back ground he got me involved in a project that I never saw any money from because we both got distracted from an even better project that paid me some really good money and I stayed there for almost a year. Let me tell you about Moyno Oilfield Products.