Last week I finished up my series about the three years I worked at Radio Shack.

It was a great job to get me through college and it also reinforced to me that a job in retail was not something that I wanted to do the rest of my life.

I wanted a standard job where you have a fixed schedule from week to week and month to month. Weekends off instead of a day off here and then another day of later in the week. I was searching for the more traditional job that to some degree doesn't exist anymore.

As I stated in one of the earlier posts in the series. I worked at Radio Shack for a short time with a guy that left us to work in sales for a local technology consulting company.

They had contracts with many cutomers in the area including Dow Chemical, schools, banks, churches, and hospitals. The company was actually split into two parts with two men as the owners.

One man owned the majority of the sales company (Solutions Plus) and the other man owned the majority of the service company (Servcom Maintenance). Each man in turn owned a minority portion of the other company.

I was working at Radio Shack one day when the former employee called the store and asked to talk to me. He mentioned that the service portion of the company was looking to hire some techs and he wanted to know if I would be interested.

Since I was actually just finishing up my Bachelor's degree in Computer Information Systems, I was more than happy to get into a job that was more closely related to the industry. Even if I had to start at the bottom, I thought the opportunity was a good one.

I gave my two weeks notice, much to the annoyance of the manager at Radio Shack as he had now lost two of his good employees to the same company (sort of) in the last couple of months.

As a matter of fact the manager of Radio Shacks wife worked for a company that used the consulting services of Solutions Plus and Servcom. I never heard the whole story, but I think they threatened to pull their business from them over the alleged poaching of us from Radio Shack.

Since we were at will employees, I don't really see what the bid deal was. Radio Shack was never a lifetime commitment for me, so it really shouldn't have been that big of a surprise.

At the time I started Servcom there were only about five other employees in that business. There were the two higher level techs that did mostly server and networking stuff. One was certified and trained in Novell which was really popular back then. The other one was their Windows server guy. I don't think either of them had their college degree, but it didn't really matter. Their on the job experience and technical certifications made my college degree look pretty worthless.

It didn't take me long to realize there was a huge difference between learning about something and actually doing it every day. I'd venture to guess that I learned more about technology in the one year I worked for Servcom than the whole time I was in college.

There was also the desk guy who managed all of our workorders and all of the service calls that came in. He was the one that coordinated with the sales side of the business when a sales person would need a tech to come take care of something for a customer.

Finally, there were two other guys and myself that were the standard techs. Servcom had a contract with a local cable company that would later become Spectrum. This is important because that contract was the main reason for my job at the beginning.

Occasionally the other two techs would be called away to help the higher level techs with this or that but our main reason for being there was all tied to the cable company.

Now that I have the stage set, make sure you come back next week to hear about my new position. I was really excited to have a full time job with fixed hours, little did I know that wouldn't be the case for long...

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