I've been unemployed since February 15th, and made the conscious decision to decline any and all jobs related to retail/manufacturing/food unless I absolutely, positively had no choice. The decision was made after realizing how irresponsible I can be with a job I don't like or respect. I hit that point this month after BARELY scraping car/cc/cell payments out of my checking account. Fortunately, in the nick of time, a guy named Thomas sent me an e-mail asking if I wanted to setup an interview, and possibly even attend a software reseller training and certification class for XProtect Enterprise, a product of Milestone Systems.
XProtect is an IP video surveillance management software package allowing you to tie your existing, and/or upgraded security system into a server/client database/archiving management system.
After 8 hours of training, I could see that the software could truely do just about anything. One of their examples was tied into a POS system using an add-on package called XProtect Transact. Each action taken on the POS logs a timestamp with XProtect Enterprise. You can watch a playback of the security footage, with a data window alongside which highlights each element of the transaction as it happens. You could also filter the video to show only specific events, such as employee login, to check that the user matches the credentials.
After the training, I had a quick interview with Thomas. He said to me that he had basically decided to hire me before I even showed up, based on my resume which he found on craigslist.org.
Now, a week later, I've received an official "Employee Letter" including my title, salary and start date (Support Engineer, competitive, July 1st). Thomas is dropping off a few grand worth of IP security cameras, and software, (at request) for me to tinker with until I start the job.
I couldn't be happier
. I didn't graduate highschool, I have no formal education to speak of, and very little
professional IT related work experience, and I finally caught a break. Yay me!
/gloat