Western Watts

Western Watts is what I call my full time employment. $7.50 / hour is quite the money making job these days. Anyways at least I am not on the phones calling people to answer survey questions. I am actually the one writing the programs that they use to answer the telephone surveys.

The job title may sound like I am smart, but really I have no idea what I am doing as a computer programmer. I wish I could say that I am a real computer programmer, but what I am learning to code in is out of date and used by no one else in the industry. So what I learn at this job is nothing that I can use at another job.

The most ridiculous part about my job is the program I have to code in. I work with Word Perfect 3.0 at work. Right now the current version of Word Perfect is at 10.0 I think. Yes, the company has somehow slipped behind in technology for the last 8 years and they still use the same ol hard to use Word Perfect.

I love the simplicity of this program. To copy you have to hit Ctl F4 and to paste all you have to do is hit Shift F10. To bold you have to hit F12 and to cut you have to ..... oh yeah, I forgot because I don't have a help sheet to remember all the simple things that you can do with normal programs. Now you probably also have forgotten that WP3.0 is also built before the technology of a mouse came out. I catch myself grabbing the mouse all the time still to highlight something instead of hitting the series of commands F12 Home Home Right Arrow Down Arrow 10 times, Ctl F4, Move cursor to where I want it, and then hit Shift 10 to copy a block of text that could be more easily done with up-to-date programs.

The best part of the job so far was when I was working on the first day and a friend of mine called me to see if I wanted to go get a bite to eat. I told him I could not because I was working a new job. He asked where I worked and I actually did not know the name of the company. All I knew was that my roommate hired me and I read the sign when going into work but more than that I had no idea so I asked my roommate, my boss, and his boss was in the room at the same time when I asked him. So that was me making my big impression on the first day of work with my superiors.