After two years of teaching, I landed a job in the educational software industry. 
This was in the early days, when only the programmers had Windows on their computers. The rest of us were running an early version of MS-DOS. I think my son’s mp3 player has more memory on it than the computer I used in that office. This was the first time I’d ever touched a PC, because all the schools where I’d studied and taught up to that time only had Apples.
I had a job that my kids think is awesome. Officially my job title was “Software Quality Control Analyst.” In ordinary terms, it means I tried to break stuff for a living. After I broke it, I would have to write a concise report explaining what I had done just before it broke. The programmers would read the report, attempt to fix the problem, and we’d rinse and repeat.
Sometimes the program would crash and the computer would have to be rebooted. It took about five minutes to restart the computer each time this would happen. Also, each program would have to be run three times during each evaluation. The first time, the tester was to input all the correct answers and check the scoring as well as execution. The second time, all the answers were to be wrong. Again, scoring was checked. On the final check, a mix of right and wrong answers were to be used. I learned a lot of useful skills in that job, from DOS commands (I even figured out how to make simple batch files) to database skills. And I learned how to describe a problem in a few words, which helped prepare me for the Twitter and text-message character limits I now live with!
Having worked in the early days of this industry, I am always amazed to see what can be done on computers less than twenty years later. And I have a healthy respect for the computer programmers who make it happen. I enjoy the small part I played in making sure the company’s software was error-free.
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