Chris Coppin
I work on the web.
When I was in school, I never knew what I wanted to do with my life. I didn't think I was very good at anything and after dropping out of Year 12 because I didn't get accepted into an Army Apprenticeship (Electrical Fitting), I found myself working at a local petrol station, pumping gas.
A while later, I found myself working for Bible Society in Australia, where a computer consultant they hired to look at their computer problems, informed me that I was pretty good with computers, quick to pick things up, and put me on the computer committee to look after basic network/printing problems etc. most computers were windows 3.11 running on a novell network.
Soon after they were having money problems (which is what happens when your support base gets old and dies, without getting any younger supporters), and offered me a redundancy, which was an easy choice for me to take.
The computer consultant they hired, in turn hired me for a couple of weeks, where I discovered that though I was quick to pick things up, I really needed to do some sort of training to be really "employable".
I looked at 3 options, University, which I didn't like the prospect of another 4 years of study, a $12,000 Computer Power Training Institute course, which was way to expensive for me at the time, or a 2 year TAFE course. I did the TAFE course at Box Hill and took to it like a fish to water.
Half way through the course the Consultant called me up to see if I was interested in a proper position, working for him part time, which I took. It involved basic troubleshooting of networks printers, new installs etc.
At the end of my course, I went full time, and found myself doing various things, including some MS Access, Exel VBA, VB6 and finally, ASP and Javascript.
All of my web work has been web applications for businesses, usually big companies like ANZ Bank, Telstra, Coles Myer etc. I have never really done any work on a public website. I find that I really enjoy pushing the web to it's limit to create applications that businesses can use to make their working lives easier. I get a great kick walking around seeing my work in use by hundreds of people i've never even met.
I find web (and programming in general) really suit my introverted nature, where I can be engrossed in solving a complex business problem and then seeing the result come to life in the page I create.