July 5th marked the anniversary of my starting at Desert Schools. The year was 1994 and I was moving from being a swing manager at McDonald’s (Pima and Indian Bend, for the curious) to a part-time teller at Desert Schools. It represented a 20% off-the-bat pay increase (from $6.04 to $7.28 per hour, for the curious) and a substantial gain in opportunity.
In that decade of service, I languished for 2½ years as a teller (went full time by August 1994), moved to our main office as a front desk clerk for about 6 months, became a loan officer for maybe a year or two, moved to Training for about two years to maintain the WinHelp employee handbook and transitioned that to a CHM file which spawned the corporate intranet, and then transferred to the Web Services department at its creation where I’ve been a Web Developer for the last three years.
It’s been a wild ride. Desert Schools is a nice place to work: it’s not perfect or necessarily great, but it’s definitely a pleasant enough way to occupy your work hours. The great thing about a decade of service is that I move up a notch in the vacation accumulation schedule from 18 days per year to 21. I just wish I was more inclined to actually use them; I guess that’s a occupational hazard of a web developer (or programmer in general).