One day after I had been there about nine months I got a call on my job from a recruiter. He told me if I wanted a programmer job all I had to do was go to an interview. I was surprised because I had never spoken to him. I had even given up looking for a programmer job almost a year before. How did he get my phone number? I had not given it to anyone and very few people knew I worked there.

I accepted his invitation, went for an interview at Transamerica Insurance Co., and sure enough got a nice programmer trainee job. That started my super long computer programming career which served me rather well until 1989. I won’t go into my programming career too much except to say I did just about all kinds of business programming for many large corporations and a few small ones.

Some of the companies I worked for as either an employee or a consultant were First Interstate Bank, Carte Blanche, Southern California Edison, International Aluminum Corp., Federal Reserve Bank, General Dynamics, Sony, Bendix Electrodynamics, EOS (Electrical Optical Systems), Lockeed Aircraft Service Co., ICFW Union, and Transamerica.

The last fifteen years was mostly all on-line programming and also lots of PC programming. During that time I was a consultant for about eight years where I learned the most about database, PC, CICS and IMS systems. I wrote and sold some software programs and developed several dozen PC database programs.

The latter ten years I worked at a small manufacturing company on batch and online systems. I was fortunate there. My boss was very nice and she overlooked my annoyance of working on thirty-five year old programs, languages, and unsophisticated online systems. This company is not mentioned above to protect the innocent. At home and after work I learned web and internet programming which I use on a regular basis even today.

Along the line I became a real estate investor, purchased seven houses with “no money down”. I got a real estate salesman license which I kept for at least a dozen years until I got tired of brokers refusing to present my offers to sellers. I got rid of my license by letting it expire and never renewed it. Well real estate was good, but had its problems.

Even today I am still an investor, but got caught in California’s (it’s all over the U.S.) 2007 - 2008 real estate downturn and for the second time, will be losing money on property. But this time it is big money. I still want to get some property, but need to regroup and reconsider California property. It is only now getting to be fairly reasonably priced for single family homes. However, the prices are still falling and who knows how far they will fall.

Along with electronics and real estate I also dabbled in stock trading. I take big risks so naturally I gravitated to options, commodities or futures trading. Still like that a lot, but am in a holding period, along with real estate until the current unstable markets change.

Continued in part IV