My first job...
... Involved programing 6502 assembly on an Apple ][e, but was really centred around managing massive amounts of paper.
We had the mainframe dot-matrix printers which produced paper in sheets per second. People could get injured if one of those bad boys jammed. We had to handle the shredding. We had to take the paper to the shredding facility in a crappy Army dodge pickup truck. The thing was so overloaded that the back would be about 2 inches off the ground and the front was so light you could probably lift it off the ground with one hand. Made handling real interesting.
We also had a room sized copy machine which always broken down. In order to make copies of all of the computer manuals, I used that copier all the time - and fixed it all the time too. I could break it down and fix it better than most Zerox technicians.
Then there was The Print Head Maintenance incident. We had just got a fancy new colour ink-jet printer - in 1985. It could print colour on transparencies 10 years before Powerpoint was a gleam in Microsoft's eyes. And we used it. It was extremely complex to setup and maintain, and it had something called "print head maintenance liquid" which cost $35 a quart and you were supposed to use to clean the print heads. I bet my boss $1 that it was plain water, and won the bet by drinking it. Of course, I had a little bit of inside info, as I had splashed some in my eye and it didn't sting or anything.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
