Where Was I On 9-11?

The first job I ever had was counting cars. I got this job while I was taking part in an information technology course.

I started the Fastrack to Information Technology (FIT) course with high hopes. The course was in its second year of existence. Some of the graduates of the first year had done pretty well out of it. Big name companies had stepped forward during the course of the year to offer apprenticeships to the top graduates from the course. A couple of them had gotten internships with Microsoft and more had gotten jobs with AOL and other hi-tech companies with good prospects. At the time I applied for the course there was every reason to hope that the next years graduates would do as well.

I didn't realise it at the time but there was an ominous bit of news over the radio as I sat in the reception area waiting to be called for my interview for the course. The receptionist relayed the news to a colleague in another room: "They're saying a second plane just crashed."

The dot com bubble was probably going to burst anyway but in the immediate months after 9-11 the sense of doom and gloom and impending armageddon was used as an excuse for many things. Many things. This was how I started my FIT Software Testing course in Ringsend VEC.

The course was further complicated by a type of culture that developed in the class among a group of locals who were all in their late teens/early twenties and taking part in the course to get an extra allowance on top of their regular social welfare payment.

Things quickly descended into a farce and it was like I was back in secondary school with a class-full of messers and jokers. Not what you'd expect from 'mature' students. One of our tutors resigned because she couldn't take it any more.

Added to this was the fact that all of the sponsorship from the previous year had fallen away. In the new post 9-11 world the dot coms weren't expecting such growth as before and were not willing to make promises of internships to any of the graduates.

I quickly decided to get out of the course and started applying for jobs. I hoped to trade on the fact that I was participating in an Information Technology Software Testing course, and wherever possible exaggerate the difficulty of it, in order to get myself into some type of computer/office based job. One of the jobs I applied for was described as 'data entry'.

This was how I started to work in traffic surveying. I don't know what they were thinking when they described the job as 'data entry'. A closer description would be 'data collection'. An even closer one would be 'counting cars'. People who have experienced the job at first hand get to the nub of the issue and describe the job as 'clicking cars'.

Many people have had unusual jobs in the past and I am happy to be able to say that my first job was counting cars. It's a good conversation starter for someone who is not a good conversationalist. Less good is when I say that I am now back counting cars again!

While many people are happy to talk about the stupid or unusual jobs they've had in the past they are happy to do so because they are in the past. Not for me.

Then again, there is always the story about how I quit my well-paid job six months ago to try to make a living from blogging and how I ended up back doing the same job I started out with when I first entered the jobs market. There's a lesson to be learned in this story for many people. Being able to tell people that I count cars for a living is a welcome distraction from having to tell that story!