Wage-slave Career Continued

My first ‘real job’ after graduation from Hiram was as a resume writer for a small company that specialized in resumes and other business writing. I ran a small one person office in a little stripmall. The company supplied quality resume paper and the templates for resumes and curriculum vitaes. My compensation was commission only. Even though companies were laying people off left and right, supposedly justifying the business model, I barely made enough to cover my auto fuel to and from the office. So, I fairly quickly found another job.

Next, I worked at Hall Processing Systems in Westlake, OH, as a technical writer. It paid better than any job I’d held previously, $25K/Y. That started in ‘90. That one lasted for about two years. It came to an end as the company was sold off by its parent, Scripts Howard. They started laying off the hourly workers and most of their engineers. Seeing the writing on the wall, I volunteered to resign in exchange for working as a consultant and freelancer to finish up the couple of manuals I’d been working on there at the end. I free-lanced for them for another six months until the outstanding manuals and product documentation were finished.

Then I did more free-lance writing, substitute teaching, and even drove a taxi for a while before my next full-time technical writing job at Kinetico Engineering Systems in Newberry Township, OH. That required me to write business proposals, manuals, and other documentation for their industrial Reverse Osmosis systems, which catered to the booming computer chip industry in California. They started me out at $26.5K.

To be Continued…

–LE