Other than helping my dad at work getting paid under the table, my first job was as a movie theater employee (vendor and usher).
We had a process called "counts", which was just the daily inventory, that everyone hated except for us few math-minded folks. The fun part of this was that all the vending terminals were old pentium 75-100MHz running software that ran on DOS (not even on windows).
My geek project was to build an app for assisting the "Counts" process with a custom GUI (YEAH EGA!) on the DOS terminals, and a backend portion that ran on the back office in Windows. They even paid me for my hours (which was awesome at the time, since it was my first time getting paid for programming). That software was run for a while even after I had quit, and because I was friends with everyone that worked there, I provided free tech support (which amounted to answering a question once every few months).
For that, I won the official "Trailblazer Award" from the company!
We had a process called "counts", which was just the daily inventory, that everyone hated except for us few math-minded folks. The fun part of this was that all the vending terminals were old pentium 75-100MHz running software that ran on DOS (not even on windows).
My geek project was to build an app for assisting the "Counts" process with a custom GUI (YEAH EGA!) on the DOS terminals, and a backend portion that ran on the back office in Windows. They even paid me for my hours (which was awesome at the time, since it was my first time getting paid for programming). That software was run for a while even after I had quit, and because I was friends with everyone that worked there, I provided free tech support (which amounted to answering a question once every few months).
For that, I won the official "Trailblazer Award" from the company!
That bit was definitely a highlight of that year.
That's my "first job" story.