When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a veterinarian. I got my first job in a pet store when I was 15 years old, and for the next 8 years, I continued to work for veterinarians. I started off as a kennel assistant cleaning cages, feeding the boarded pets and walking the dogs.  Then I moved up to veterinary assistant, assisting with surgeries and x-rays.

Denied by Christopher Newport University (actually I wasn’t completely denied and was just advised to take a few courses at the local community college and then reapply), I was excited about the veterinary field. I changed my mind to go to Virginia Tech and traveled to their open house. While on the tour, I got to examine diseased horse and cow lungs, cuddle an orphaned black bear cub and walk down the halls with a horse who was a patient. It was a very fun day there.

But then the world changed literally almost overnight … The Internet.

This was mid-90s and I had just not too long graduated high school. The Internet had just came online, everyone wanted to get on America Online, Compuserve, Prodigy, Netzero, and other ISPs, so people were buying computers left and right to access it. It was literally a computer craze throughout the country. It was a madhouse. Everywhere you drove, there were discarded computer boxes sitting outside in the garbage pile at nearly every home. Everyone was buying new computers. The Internet was everywhere and everyone wanted to get on.

Unemployed at the time, one day, my Mom came in my room, threw the newspaper at me and said, “You’re not going to lay around my house. Gateway is hiring”. I looked at the ad and thought to myself, what in the world am I going to do at Gateway? I don’t know anything about computers. I was unemployed at the time, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt. Gateway had opened a brand new plant in my city and was mass hiring, looking for new employees. I went to the interview. It was 1998, and I was hired on the spot.

I was hired as entry level technical support along with a group of other people and was given a tour of the manufacturing plant and call floor, which was all in the same building. The building was massive.

They trained us onsite on how to build and break down computers, and then they gave us our CompTIA A+ Certifications (they paid for it). It was then, I forgot all about wanting to be a veterinarian, but if my Mom hadn’t come to me with that newspaper for the Gateway job ad, it’s probably what I would have been today.

However, I’ve worked in the tech field ever since and I don’t regret my choice. Thanks Mom.