In the beginning...

How I built a career without the expense of college, and you can too

Many of my readers ask me how reading and writing changed my life and led me from a minimum-wage job to a comfortable career, or at least they would have if I had many readers. So, today, I will take a break from writing about writing and explain how I succeeded and how you can too.

My first gig out of high school was chauffeuring copy machines from the company's warehouse to customer locations (how's that for padding my resume?). The work was fine, and I liked my first boss a lot. However, my second boss was the equivalent of dousing myself with gasoline and heading into the hills to roast marshmallows. So, within a month or two after the switch, I watched my minimum wage deflagrate into a pile of ash. On the plus side, they gifted me a lovely pink slip to blow my tears into*.

My second job was working for the Library of Congress. While that may sound impressive, it was also a minimum-wage job where I duplicated audiobook cassettes from master reels. They did have a union, though, whose dues I couldn't afford, so it was a step up.

My favorite part about this job was the decore. There were two entrances. The interior designers had paved one in asbestos tile and carpeted the other with a Berber that looked and smelled like mold.

My office was the aristocratic apex of the designer's work. The creative master had bathed my floor in disco shag, at least a foot deep; the color an eye-peeling orange that only the 1970s could muster. My three-step workday involved:

• Hacking through the tangerine jungle to my desk.

• Copying cassette tapes.

• Wading back out to my car.

I consistently took my brain to work with me, but I could have left it at home and performed the same.

Completing my tasks took the entire forty-hour slog each week when I started this job. However, within a few months, I figured out how to finish all my assignments in about four hours.

I usually don't get bored because I can conjure a thousand things to do; however, there are only so many ways to entertain oneself with magnetic tape. So, after mastering the art of spinning a cassette tape from one end of the reel to the other using the tip of a pencil, I went to my boss and asked for something to do. He said, "We're a library. Go read a book." Before he could summon some other chore for me, I jaunted over to the book section of the library and started browsing.

The first book I read was about a time vampire and a box canyon. Those are the only two fragments of the story I remember, so it must have been exceptional; maybe a geological romance. After that, I continued reading novels from various genres.

One day, while returning The Phantom of the Opera (my favorite of the monster classics), I stumbled upon a book about computer programming in a language called C because it was sticking out of the bottom shelf too far. Something about it piqued my interest, so I checked it out and started reading.

I worked at the Library of Congress in the early 90s, so, being the federal government, we used a knotted Inca Quipus for all our computing needs. Fortunately, C runs on those too.

I didn't own a computer then and wouldn't for another five years. So, I'd read the C book after finishing my tasks and wait until nobody was using the shared computer to practice what I had learned.

When I started the book, I barely knew how to turn a computer on. However, within a few weeks, I had replaced the hundred-and-three-character Novell Netware commands we had to type to start various programs with a friendly menu written in C. Each little success encouraged me to learn a little more.

Reading library books is only half the story, though. Once I felt I knew enough to be taken seriously in a job interview, I started writing resumes and cover letters and sending them around using a friend's America Online account (which was to the internet what a grape is to a bicycle).

At first, companies rejected my resume, so I bought a book at Barnes & Noble. It was a Dean Koontz thriller about a golden retriever who was more intelligent than humans, showing he had researched his subject material well. Then, I returned to Barnes & Noble and bought a book about writing resumes, where I learned what padding meant.

Soon, I got a callback from Packard Bell, who made home computers with the same functionality as those computer-shaped shells they use in furniture store displays. Surprisingly, they offered me a job in tech support. It wasn't writing code, but the job was a step in the right direction. So, I packed up my C reference books and a small statue of a cowboy that one of the other Library of Congress employees had sculpted for me during their boredom and joined Packard Bell at twice the pay.

After a few months of answering the phones and sending out replacement hard drives, I grew bored. So, I started writing resumes and flooding the internet again.

I landed three other jobs after Packard Bell; one building PCs, one administering a network, and, at last, one writing software. Unfortunately, I was still a neophyte and got fired after a few months. However, I learned a lot and was better prepared to try again.

As with learning C, each microscopic success in my budding career masked a flurry of rejections and drove me forward. Finally, two and a half years after I left the Library of Congress, I landed a software testing job at Intel, which paid more than six times the library salary, and did it for the cost of a handful of computer books I couldn't find at the local library.

I'm not the best software engineer, but I've managed to slalom halfway down the right side of the bell curve without a degree in computer science. Eventually, I did go to college and graduated just before my fiftieth birthday with a degree in English and Creative Writing. I went to college to improve my prose, not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

I built an exciting career through reading, writing, and perseverance. But the most beautiful part of this story is that you can too.

If you want any tips on growing your career through reading and writing, let me know in the comments, and I'll do my best to help.

You can read more about my time at the Library of Congress in Bob the Wasp Cleaver.

* Yes. I end many sentences with prepositions because I like to roll Latin-speaking folks around in their graves, and, more importantly, I'm not speaking Latin. Besides, saying, "They gifted me with a lovely pink slip into which I could blow my tears," sounds more stuffy than a nose with a cold. Take that, Poole and Dryden**!

** Joshua Poole and John Dryden are the two people who, not content with all the Latin words in English, also tried to schlep over its grammar.