My first "unofficial" job as I remember was helping my mother clean our family business, Stone's Mobile Radio. As I grew older, I started to help my older brother deliver papers for the Grand Forks Herald. One day while I was out on the route, a man stopped and asked me if I had seen another delivery person for one of the once-a-week papers named the Tri-County Press. I told him I had not, but he told me to give him a call because he wanted to offer me a job.

I went home and told my mother. (These days mothers would be worried about such an occurrence, but back then, all was good, especially in our safe little town). My mother then called the Tri-County press offices and spoke with this gentleman. Before I knew it, I had my first "official" job of delivering the Tri-County Press once a week in our neighborhood.

A few years later my stepbrother and I took over another local paper route for the Grand Forks Herald. This route was large enough that we could split it up between the two of us and make a modest income while attending late elementary school and Jr. High. I stil recall the Thanksgiving newspaper being so large, that our parents would break up the papers into bundles of 30-40 papers and drop them off at various spots along the route so we could "reload". The papers were so large that we simply couldn't handle them all at once.

Collecting money from customers was the one thing my stepbrother and I loathed about the job. Since we had a PC in the house (I believe at that time it was the Tandy 1000), we printed up flyers to stuff in the papers explaining the benefits of pay-by-mail for the newspaper. A few weeks later, we had reduced the number of personal monthly collections from around 150 to 20. Instead of collecting all the money for the paper, then sending a check to the publisher, we were now receiving checks from the paper. You might call that my first "good business decision".

In high school I had decided it was time to get a "real" job and quit the paper route, immediately taking a job as a cart attendant at the local Target department store. I remember thinking this would be a breeze compared to getting up at 5am every morning to deliver newspapers. But, the first time we worked a weekend I realized it wasn't any easier. Being so close to the Canadian border we had thousands of Canadians come to shop every weekend. To keep up we continuously swept the lot (and the lot of the adjoining mall) to gather carts left by customers. We ran out of carts on many occasions.

After a few years of this, I decided to train as a cashier, and eventually as a customer service clerk. I soon realized that wasn't the best decision I had made. Instead of being outside, getting exercise collecting carts, I now had to stand in one spot for hours. The customer service portion of the job wasn't that bad, because every return had a different story. But, the cashiering proved to be quite monotonous.

After high school I attended the University of North Dakota. Having grown up playing with and programming computers, the guidance counselor thought that Computer Science would be a good path for me. I explained how after finishing our paper route, my step-brother and I spent the 2-3 hours waiting for school by hacking away on our computer. We would enter code from magazines and write original text-based adventure programs after becoming bored with the games we purchased.

After two and half years attending UND, I found that while the Computer Science and Math classes were a blast, the general subjects I found boring and uninteresting, causing my grades to slip. After talking with my guidance counselor, he suggested that I attend a technical school that focuses more on getting a career. So, I then transferred to the North Dakota State College of Science in Wahpeton, ND.

Because most of my credits transferred, I really didn't have many extra classes to take. One physical education class, and one accounting class was about it. After the first semester we were offered Internships with area companies. We chose which companies we would want to work for, and went on interviews to make the process "realistic". The companies then chose who they wanted to join them.

I consider myself lucky that I was chosen for what I considered the best job available. I went to work as an unpaid intern at the Dakota Clinic in Fargo, ND. There I was trained and molded by their team and soon was working as what I would consider a "peer level" instead of just an intern. I attribute a lot of what I learned to the team at the Dakota Clinic.

After the internship I returned to school at NDSCS and little did I know a recruiter had called the Dakota Clinic looking for people to fill positions at a company in Wadena, MN, and they gave them my name as a candidate. So, while still in school, I received a call from a "headhunter". He told me about the opportunity and set up an interview with the company.

I received an offer from the company and spoke with my professors in school. They said that it would be no problem to take the job that would count as a "work-study" towards my Associate's degree. I remember the head of the IT department explicitly saying to me "We train you to get a job, and you got one, so go out and have fun!"

So, my first official programming job was at Homecrest Industries in Wadena, MN. I fit in nicely with the programming team there and quickly dove into projects that interested me. Rewriting their inventory data collection system was my biggest accomplishment, and also lead to my next job.

I was soon hired by Taylor Corporation in Mankato, MN to fill an open position in their inventory programming team. After a few years my duties changed from just Inventory programming into all aspects of the homegrown package, later focusing on web application design. Having an understanding of the core system was a necessity in providing functional web applications for our customers.

During this time I also was dabbling in writing little tools and applications to make my job as a programmer easier. Soon this had grown into a full-time job in itself. I also had started writing for a couple of the industry trade magazines, and eventually also wrote two books on web application programming for the iSeries platform. My plate was now very full, and it was time to make a change.

Eventually I decided to leave Taylor Corporation to follow my own path. I didn't like leaving the wonderful team at Taylor, but I also had hundreds of customers relying on my personal applications that I didn't want to leave in the dark.

I have been on my own now for a few years providing iSeries based software, writing technical books and training manuals, consulting with companies around the world and speaking at user group conferences, as well as larger conferences such as iSeries Devcon. I have grown from having only a few customers to thousands of customers around the globe both using my software and receiving consulting services. Things get busier every year, and I both dread and look forward to having to hire my first employee.

Bradley V. Stone