Blast from the past

Not trying to steal/copy The Pioneer Woman's similarly titled blog post for today, really. It just fit.

I mentioned that I used to be a software quality assurance engineer - right? I did a four year stint at Intel, Jones Farm starting out in the Software Toolshop group and then being reorg'd (reorganized for those of you who've never had it done multiple times) into the Software Coporate Quality Network (CQN) Group.

Well while going through those many reorgs I worked with some great people, not so great people and truly trying people. I think you have to have a certain personality type to work well within the culture they try to build, or as a friend said, I was cursed with a bunch of bad managers.

So while being an "Intel Involved" person of the year, I had my group manager reorg our group and leave me off the new chart. I happened to be home sick that day and blurry eyed poured over the chart several times before realizing I really wasn't on the chart. Hauled my sick carcass into work the next day so that I could ask my group manager (proper protocol would have been to ask my direct manager but he wasn't in, and since I sat near her) what was going on. She had decided that she was going to put me into redeployment (I have no idea why she never liked me). (At the time I was the Corporate Inspections Moderator teaching Inspections across the corporation and rewriting a manual for them.) She never did follow the proper way of doing that either and would within the year find herself no longer working at Intel either. She was the head bad manager.

Anyway, getting back to the point of this post now that you have a little background. One of the cool guys I worked with was Robb Topolski. He also knew that what the manager did sucked so when a former co-worker called asking him for a heads up on good QA people, Robb came knocking on my cubicle wall to ask if I'd be interested. That's how in January of 2000 I ended up leaving Intel and working for almost four years at Digimarc.

Robb, I unfortunately lost track of, so it was cool to have Brandon call me this morning going - didn't you work with him? Why? Because there's an article in Wired that Brandon says will make it into the print version. Very cool!