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Professional Background

My boss likes to joke that every few months, he and I have some random conversation and he learns about a totally new line of work I've been in that is completely unrelated to any of the others. Sometimes I feel as though it took me a long time to figure out exactly what I wanted to do. I'm never quite sure if this makes me a jack of trades or just confused and indecisive.

911 Operator/Police Dispatcher
I spent five years receiving 911 calls and dispatching police officers for the Jacksonville Sherrif's Office. The job has a huge turnover problem (about 60% nationally) and a lot of people don't like it due to the stress and pressure. I loved it. Mostly due to the stress and pressure.

Police Officer
After graduating from the police academy in May 1991, I worked as a Reserve Police Officer through 1999 when my certification lapsed. I had more fun in this position than in any other job I've ever done. Even today, there is seldom a day that goes by that I don't miss being in a police car. Unfortunately, I missed so much in-service training when I was away at college that I would have to go through the entire police academy again to be recertified. Not one of my better decisions now that I look back at it.

HTML Instructor
After teaching myself HTML in the months just prior to going away to college, I ended up working as the assistant to the webmaster within a few short weeks of my arrival. This opened a number of doors for me including a job as the director of a company that taught HTML and site design to the student and faculty population on campus.

Lighting Technician
After returning from college, my roommate worked as a bartender at one of the larger clubs in north Florida. She introduced me to the DJ and almost immediately, I knew that I wanted to learn to spin. I first had to learn to work the intelligent lighting system. This served as an excellent pre-cursor to learning to DJ, as the lighting and other atmosphere-controlling elements (lasers, fog, etc) have just as much to do with the crowds response (or lack of) as the music.

Club DJ
I started spinning records in 1999 and stuck with it until 2002, when I made several big decisions in my life. First, I wanted out of the club scene. I was tired from being in a club six nights a week for three years, and I knew that if I stuck around, I'd only get into trouble anyway. I spun as a guest in a few different venues off and on for a year or so, and then stopped. It just wasn't worth the expense of keeping an inventory of vinyl. I'd really like to continue spinning, but I don't want to spend the money on records, and frankly, I don't have room for all the equipment.

Current Profession

These days, my life looks a little more like that of a grown-up. I am an IT professional on a small Product Management team that defines the software solutions and processes that our company uses to offer its services to clients. Our company is very large and very global (clients in 70 countries, speaking nearly 35 languages) and my team is what I consider high-end talent. It took me a while to really bring this into perspective, but we are five people in a company of 65,000, yet have a lot of voice when it comes to defining best practice and shaping the software solutions we implement.

I have worked for my boss directly, or indirectly, for the past four years. We started at a competing company and I followed him over to our current company a year ago. I bring the technical edge to our team, with a background in programming and large data operations. I tend to manage the technical aspects of our implementations and the majority of the project management.

I am also a trained Six Sigma Black Belt, with experience running DMAIC and DMADV projects.