Optical Data

This was my first real job. I'm not going to count the succession of part time-soul-sucking jobs that I had right after graduation. No, This was the first... and the closest I came to actually following a career path that had something to do with my major.

Optical Data was a cutting edge New Media company that wanted to revolutionize the textbook. They offered math and science curriculums on Laserdisc (remember those?) for grades K-6.

The idea was to provide a tool that would enable teachers to enhance their lessons with concepts and experiments that might be too costly or impractical to include otherwise. It was adopted in several school districts across the country and translated into Spanish and Chinese.

While I was there I worked in the audio/video department. I went out on video and photo shoots, recorded sound and even got to play guitar on a number of the original songs that were written for the lessons. At night I would work in the desktop publishing department where I learned to work with programs like Aldus Pagemaker, Illustrator and PhotoShop 2.0.

I still fondly remember this job because it was exciting to feel like a part of something big. And I met a lot of people that are still in my life. I worked long hours and learned a lot but it was fun. Unfortunately, ODC was bought by a larger interest and pretty much everyone was laid off. The domain is still active, and now it leads here, where I imagine the products live on.

Allegra New Media

After I was laid off from Optical Data, I worked at a number of really odd jobs trying to stay afloat. Often a couple at a time. Eventually another ODC alum called and asked if I wanted to do some freelance design at this small software company in Fairfield, NJ. They were working under contract with Berlitz, the language tape company, on a series of CD-ROMs and needed someone to design some screens and sort through all the photos.

It was a pretty good job with some good people... except for their programmer/tech support guy who sat in the cubicle adjacent to mine. He would take calls from totally clueless users and fly into a rage; shouting and growling and pounding his fists on his desk with such force that he would knock things off of my bookshelves.

When the project ended so did my job, but I made enough of a good impression on one of the producers that when he left for Peterson's College and Career Guides to work with their brand new website team, he got me a temp job there.

Petersons

Peterson's College and Career Guides of Princeton, NJ was started in 1967 by the husband and wife team of Peter and Casey Hegener. They built an empire on that giant book that lists every college and university in the country with fascinating fun facts like student population and how many books are in the library. Everyone gets a copy of this book in high school. I'm pretty sure.

They also produced graduate school guides, magazines, and study guides for the SAT, GRE, ETC... but I don't think anything was ever really as popular as that flagship guide.

In the mid 90's, Peterson's - like pretty much everyone else, was looking for a way to harnass this new internet thing into a moneymaking scheme that would bring everyone fabulous wealth and power. What they came up with was POLARIS. It was an acronym, of course, and I forget what it stood for, but rest assured it was top secret and we spent a lot of time on it.

The idea, actually, was pretty good. I vaguely recall it involving applying to college online or something. Unfortunately, it was a more than the internet could handle at the time (14.4 Modems!) and a bit more of a risk than most colleges and universities wanted to take.

I was there for about three years... eventually being hired and having health insurance for the first time ever. Over that time I worked on a number of other projects including the main Peterson's Site, some weird Student Lounge thing, some other weird thing called CollegeQuest (that might be what Polaris became) and what seemed like an endless stream of CD-ROMs that were included in all the books. You have to remember that these were the days when having something on CD-ROM was the shit. You were nothing without a CD-ROM. Even if it was all just redundant information from the book you just bought.

Peterson's was good for awhile, but it is in fact a fairly large company. Well, the largest I've ever worked for. And with a large company, come large company problems; so soon I felt the need to move on. Now at this time the Internet was at full steam so you couldn't swing a college graduate without landing in an internet job, so that's exactly what happened...

OnTap

At one time - I have been lead to believe - OnTap was a pretty hep site. Some young startup with good writing and good humor and plenty of 'tude. I'm not sure how long these glory years lasted, but I am quite sure that they were well over with by the time I got there.

The OnTap I knew was a part of the giant college marketing machine MarketSource, which is responsible, among other things, for those little gender specific gift boxes you get when you move into your dorm freshman year. Old Spice deodorant and Brut cologne if you are a boy and Secret and Tampax if you are a girl.

MarketSource had absorbed OnTap as their mouthpiece or public face. It proved to be a lot more accessible than the drab MarketSource corporate website. I should have known then... we were a trojan horse, designed to inject America's student body with a secret marketing agenda. I was young and foolish.

OnTap was, if nothing else, an ambitious website. We had several different "channels", main features and sub features and a herd of writers to provide content for them all. The team that was assembled was more than competent and I'm sure under different circumstances it could have succeeded, but one thing that no one foresaw was the gradual crumbling of the current internet model.

It started with a huge company meeting where we met our new "benign overlords". This was already eerily familiar to me. The language and suspect "enthusiasm" of these new suits could only mean one thing and I had pretty much made up my mind not to go through that again. Besides I had already received a call from my friend Tom that there was room for me at the Chopping Block...

Chopping Block

I have been at the Chopping Block five years now... working on my sixth. It is certainly the best job I have had and I thoroughly enjoy the people I work with.

There have been difficult times, of course, that is to be expected in any workplace... but I can honestly say that I can not think of any other place I would want to be.

Love Fest! Kisses all around.