My First Corporate Job - 1994

I graduated from RPI in June of 1993 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. After failing to receive any viable job offers with the undergraduate degree, I returned to RPI for an MBA in August of 1993.
Since I knew that having an MBA without any real work experience (not counting my summer job as a laborer and data-entry technician for my Grandparents irrigation business in the Hamptons) would probably make me less than marketable, I decided take a semester off of school to do a Co-op with a local company to get some real business experience. Since my intention was to get my MBA concentration in manufacturing (a good compliment to my engineering degree), I thought an engineering co-op would be a good choice. And, since most of the other applicants for those co-op jobs would be undergraduate students, I would have an advantage with a full engineering degree already on my resume.
I ended up vying for a position with a local manufacturer in the paper industry, Albany International. They are a multinational corporation, and the division for which I would be working made giant fabric loops that act as filters on paper-making machines. When I say giant, I mean giant - the fabrics were woven in continuous loops on looms that were as big as 60 feet across.
I was chosen to interview for the company, and I think they had selected only 3-4 candidates for the interviews. It turned out that one of the other candidates was one of my fraternity brothers from Acacia, and I felt kind of bad because he assumed (maybe correctly) that he had little chance of winning the position over me due to his status as an undergraduate student and mine as a holder of a BS in Mechanical Engineering. Of course, I did not feel bad enough to give up my quest for the job. This was for my future after all.
However, I began to have doubts about this job when I heard a rumor about the previous co-op student with this employer. Apparently, this previous student/employee, who was in my class at RPI but familiar to me, had actually been killed on the job a few months earlier. You see, these giant looms have lots of moving parts driven by very powerful hydraulics. Everyone who works on or near the machines is given a padlock to which only they have the key. If you are going to work on a loom, you would put your padlock on the main power switch for the unit, locking it in the off position while you worked. This young man had decided to take some measurements on an idle machine while the operator was on a break. But for some reason, he neglected to padlock the switch. The operator came back and started the machine, and the poor guy was crushed by huge metal arms that move about 4 feet in either direction with great speed and power. He lived for a few days in a coma, but never recovered.
To my surprise, the interviewer actually brought up the story and explained to me what had happened. He asked me if this scared me. I said it was unfortunate, but I have a "healthy respect" for large machinery. I had worked on concrete mobiles with my Dad when I about 12 years old, doing jobs that in retrospect were pretty scary, and a kid would probably never be let near the things today, but I learned to be careful, to understand the risks, and to keep myself out of trouble. Apparently, I impressed the interviewer enough to get the job. It did not pay much, but I was a student, so any income made me feel rich. It was more than I had made previously, and I had very little in the way of expenses.
The best thing was that the job was 7 AM to 3:30 PM five days a week. So not only was I making money, but I had no homework and afternoons, evenings, and weekends with no obligations.
The job itself turned out to be boring, at least at first. I was sent on a mission that I thought was futile - they wanted me, a rookie engineer, to take a whole bunch of measurements on these giant looms using slightly different settings to see if I could find a pattern in the effects of those settings on the overall quality of the output. Basically, this 100+ year old company thought that maybe I could somehow find a way to improve the quality of their products from 3% variation to 2% variation in a 6-month effort. Eventually, I tried explaining to my boss that if they really wanted to improve the quality, they needed to determine what was happening at the molecular level during the weaving process. They needed to do finite element analysis (FEA to us engineer). So he got me in touch with their R&D department, at which point I found out that of course they were in the process of obtaining computers capable of doing such modeling already. Meanwhile, I had already spent months gathering and analyzing data from my measurements (always taken with my padlock in its proper place). My results showed almost nothing of statistical importance in my opinion. A statistics expert from a local university was brought in and he confirmed this.
However unimportant my work turned out to be for the company, it was very important to me. This was 1994, so my analysis was all done on a PC with a 33MHz processor. Yes, that's 33, as in my current PC runs at 2,400 MHz. And despite my very early request for a "real" database program to use like MS Access 2.0, I was forced to do all of the analysis in Excel 4.0. Since I had already developed my policy of "anything I have to do more than twice should be automated," I spent a good deal of my time programming in Visual Basic to make it easier to enter and analyze the data I was collecting. This was actually requested by my boss, too, because he wanted to be able to continue the measurements after I left, but he wouldn't know how to get Excel to do the analysis. So, I needed to create an interface that he could use without me.
It turned out that I really enjoyed the programming part of the job, but I did not really get anything out of working with the machines (despite the thrill of defying death every day). So when I returned to my MBA program the following semester, I changed my focus from manufacturing to Management Information Systems (MIS).
Whatever was happening at work, my life outside of the job during that time (July - Dec 1994) was nothing short of fantastic. I was living in an apartment near the RPI campus with my best friend Lars and another guy named Eric who was a good friend of Lars. I was still involved with my fraternity, but I really had no responsibilities other than work.
So my schedule consisted of playing soccer with Lars and Eric on a local men's league team, and playing hockey in intramural leagues and pick-up games. Fortunately, I also chose this time to go on a diet. That combined with my schedule of rigorouse exercise resulted in me losing about 40 pounds and getting into what is still the best shape of my life.
My normal weekday went like this: 7-3:30 work at Albany International. Come home and eat a salad as a snack. Go to nearby RPI field to play in a pickup soccer game (the students from Europe and South America played every day, and they always wanted another goalie) until 5 or 6 PM. Come home and eat dinner - usually pasta and meat sauce. Rest for a while (browse the then-infant internet at 14.4kbs). Play 1-2 hours of ice hockey.
On the weekends I would also have league soccer games and and lost of strenuous partying at the fraternity.
It was the "Summer of Dan." That was until I played in my first hockey game in a full-checking league at RPI in the fall. I went for a puck in the corner, and some overzealous player on the other team cross-checked me from behind. I went into the boards hard and got up slowly. When I got to the bench I realized my shoulder was sore, but I finished the game. The next morning when I woke up to go to work, my shoulder had become so sore that I could barely move. I struggled to roll out of bed and I literally crawled to the phone. I called my boss and told him I wouldn't be coming in. I got to the infirmary somehow (not sure if Lars took me there or what). It turned out that I had a separated shoulder. My arm was in a sling and would be so for the next 4-6 weeks. It was like an eternity for me. I went from extremely active to inactive overnight. I was not happy. I did recover and eventually played a few games in that checking league (after buying better shoulder pads for myself), but that would be my only season of full-contact hockey. It just wasn't that much better to make it worth the extra risk of injury.
So I completed my co-op assignment in December, 1994, and prepared to go back to school, now a semester behind all of the people with whom I had started the MBA program. I was also armed with some real corporate experience, more confidence (due to the experience and my new slimmer physique), and a new focus on information technology.
I'll end with this little quip that was the funniest moment I had on the job: My boss was named Richard, but his co-workers called him Dick. One day a co-worker was talking to someone near Dick's desk and wanted to write something down. So he looked over and said "Hey, you got a pencil, Dick."
"My wife seems to think so," was the immediate reply. I guess it's not that funny now, but it was my first exposure to off-color humor in an otherwise stuffy workplace, so I almost fell over laughing.