Becoming Professional

In early 1999 I responded to an ad for a computer technician from a local IT consultancy. I'd heard that they were doing a lot of Year 2000 auditing work, and I decided that might be good. 

They were offering $20 an hour. Not bad considering I was working a driveway for $7.

It was a small business - the owner  was a nerdy intelligent type with no formal IT qualifications but had a knack for working things out. His wife was a bulldog. She clearly wore the pants, and he did as he was told. 

It started out well. We were busy. There was a lot going on. They had a lot of auditing work to do, and I started being sent off to the capitals to do auditing work in timber mills, and various tissue product factories. Plenty of stories to be told from these alone, but alas, I can't tell them without giving away who the clients were. 

Once that was done, things slowed down. The boss started to spend most of his time away doing contracted work to one of those mills, leaving me with his wife.

By this time, I'd been moved into a traineeship. It was cheaper for them, and the wages were half. I'd have to go to TAFE and do a Certificate IV in IT. They normally didn't take direct applications at the IV level, but they took me.  They put me into the core subjects, and I asked for the final assessments within the first week. I was given a couple. I gave them work that the teachers didn't even understand. It was too far over their heads, and they'd only just finished the Diploma level work themselves.

She made it abundantly clear that she didn't like me. She didn't like my hair. She wasn't happy that I refused to drive their putrid old Mitsubishi to clients instead of my nice new Hyundai with CD player, AC and power steering. Then she didn't like the fact that I made coffee, so she took away the coffee making facilities. So, I'd walk to the shop around the corner. We had a reasonable CBD location, so it was a 2 minute walk. For a while she was fine with that given I only did it if I had nothing else to do. Then she wasn't. 

Then I'd get in trouble for providing quotes to walkins looking for computers because I hadn't run the pricing past her. There was profit in them and they were competitive. 

There'd be arguments. I'd be in the middle of fixing something for a client, and she'd call going off because some other client needed me and I wasn't there. She had no grasp whatsoever of how to determine the priority of a client and their issues relative to whether it was critical or not. 

Soon I was told not to sell anything. She couldn't fund the stock. My pay was often late.

At the end of the year I asked to wrap up the traineeship. I considered the TAFE time to be utterly pointless. I could RPL nearly the whole thing, and the time I was required on campus (mostly because I had to attend until I was either  RPL'd, or given the final assessment), was just taking me away from actual income deriving work. 

This had an adverse effect. The boss' wife decided this just meant that they'd have to spend more money on me, and decided they'd like to get rid of me. I started getting calls telling me not to come in. We wound up in front of some board related to the traineeship to work out a path forward. The first  thing she did was start complaining about me and how I hadn't done any of the TAFE work, and  that the TAFE staff were complaining about me to her. She started complaining about clients complaining about me. What she didn't know, and what completely undermined her credibility from the minute her mouth opened was that I'd been offered a job by that same TAFE, offering me significantly more money, plus offering to get me through the end of the traineeship. Yep, obviously I was a do nothing student who the TAFE hated. Sure. 

Not long after we'd parted ways, I started getting calls from their clients. They were un-contactable, and the clients needed work done. My work with TAFE was only a few hours a week as was my study given I'd RPL'd enough to be down to only a handful of units to complete. Now I had people offering me money to fix their problems. A couple of them apparently had complained about me according to my previous employer. These same people told me that they actually didn't like dealing with her, and would have changed service providers if it wasn't for me. 

So, I became a self-employed computer consultant. No office, limited tools, a spreadsheet for an invoice template, and not much of a clue. I did at least have a mobile phone and a car.

The Cert IV was done and dusted quickly. 2000 was a crazy year. I'd moved out in the middle of it, turning the front of my new tiny flat into my office. I was by no means wealthy, but it was a busy year.