The College Years (1998-2001)
I began school at Buffalo State College in September of 1998. In retrospect, I really wish I would have pushed my self harder when looking for a college. I found myself extremely bored at Buffalo State, and the Information Systems program there left something to be desired.
I was however learning a lot at my job. Through some genius by Scott, the Parkside Computing owner, he was able to get a contract with Adelphia Cable installing cable modems in customer’s homes. At the time, there was only a small area in WNY which had broadband access, but they were expanding quickly and I started working more. We literally wrote the handbook on broadband modem installation and upgrades for consumers and businesses for Adelphia.
As another added bonus, I had placed advertisements for an online Casino up on 7thsphere.com, and I was raking in the money. I will never forget a week when I received about $500 in advertising revenue for doing absolutely nothing. This was a big deal when my minimum wage job only paid $5.50 an hour.
In early 1999, real life was consuming me and I sort of let 7thsphere.com die down. We had lost our web hosting account, as our original provider was purchased, and we didn’t fit into the acceptable use policies of the new regime. I also lost all of my files in a hard drive crash within two weeks of 7th Sphere being taken down. Unfortunately, it would take more work than I had time for to get things back up and running, and the advertising revenue stream had been shutdown as the online Casino was closed down or had folded.
Life in 1999 was pretty good. I split my weeks between work and school, and I spent my weekends between Alison and going to raves. However, in late 1999, I had decided that I wanted to find an older girlfriend who didn’t have the curfew issues that Alison did. We broke up after being steady for nearly three years. I was going through a hard time with work, school, and my parents were on the verge of a divorce.
The year 2000 started off with my mother having emergency surgery for a brain aneurysm. This was quite difficult for me to deal with, and I had a hard time with work and school. In May of 2000, life finally got a little bit better. My mother’s condition was improving, and her and my father were back together. I also met my future wife, Debbie. She mistook a friend of mine as a friend of hers while we were standing in line for a night club. Soon after that, we ran into each other a couple of times at school. While she had given me her phone number on a couple of occasions, it took me a while to get up enough nerve to ask her out. Every time I met her was by complete chance, and I wonder what would have happened if I had not run into her at school that last time.
During this time, I continued to work hard at Parkside Computing. Scott’s small three employee business soon grew on the back of Adelphia as they had expanded their broadband coverage area. The LAN center portion had closed, and network services became the exclusive focus of the company. We soon went from performing about 20 service calls a day to doing upwards of 50 service calls a day. This was my first time where I was put in the position of supervisor, and I felt like I was learning quite a bit about business and technology at the same time. The company continued to grow and expand, and so did my responsibilities.
In mid-2001, Parkside was given the opportunity to expand its operations to another area where Adelphia had coverage. One of those areas was Orlando, Florida..
