When I graduated from college in 2002, I had a degree in Computer Engineering with a minor in Spanish and in Computer Science. For most of my college career, I had assumed I would end up working for Sprint, since I was into technology, and they were the big tech company in KC. I interned there in the summers of 2000 and 2001, and I met a smart and cute girl there that I thought I might marry. The Sprint career didn't work out, but the girl did. Meghan graduated in May 2002, and I graduated in August. Meghan's first job was for a business intelligence company called Actuate. She did customer support for them. We were dating then, and she would tell me about the work she did, and I remember thinking it was not a good fit for my skillset, as it was heavy on coding, and that wasn't my strong suit. I did get to meet her coworkers and her boss Brian at a team-building event that included significant others. In October of that year, she left Actuate for a better job. Actuate's stock was tanking at the time, and layoffs were imminent, and her new job offered a raise and stability, so that was good.
At that point I had graduated and had started working in the back room of Hastings, a music/book/video store in Lawrence, which wasn't exactly a career type of job. That Christmas, we got engaged. The next spring, there was an opening at Actuate. Meghan encouraged me to apply, but I remembered how she had described her job when she worked there, and I didn't think it was a fit for me. We were planning to get married that fall, and Meghan rightfully wanted me to have a real job by then, and she also knew the Actuate job would be a good fit for me.
So she took matters into her own hands. She used a copy of my resume that I had saved on her computer from when I had been working on it at her apartment, and because she didn't have access to my e-mail account, she created a new fake one that had my name in it, and then applied for the Actuate job with a cover letter that she wrote, impersonating me, and sent the resume she pulled from her computer. I had no idea she had done any of this. Soon, Actuate replied back to "me" (at the e-mail address Meghan had created) saying that they wanted me to do an interview, and Meghan then finally shared with me the whole story. That left me a little sheepish, as she had been able to get me an interview for a career-type job when I hadn't even thought it to be worth applying for, but I quickly got over it and arranged to have the interview, which was with Brian, whom I'd previously met at her team-building event. I had another couple interviews and apparently did well enough, as they made me an offer. I was really pretty impressed with Meghan's resourcefulness and ability to find a creative solution for a problem. Her fiance didn't have a real job and was reluctant to apply for a job she knew he would be good at, so she found his resume, created a fake e-mail account, wrote a fake cover letter, and sent it off, resulting in him getting the job. Impressive. Not that I had any doubt at that point, but that further cemented why I knew she was the one for me.
On April 28, 2003, I started my career at Actuate as a Customer Support Engineer, supporting the iServer product line as part of the Server Team. It was a good fit for me, as it allowed me to use my engineering skills for troubleshooting, but it also allowed me to interface with customers, which was something I wanted to do, but wasn't terribly confident in, as I was somewhat shy. But I knew I would grow in that area just by having that job, and I did. At the time, I didn't think too much about how long I would stay at that job. I just knew it seemed to be a good fit for me and would probably be a good start to my career. And it was.
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