Patrick McCann

I drove a refrigerated tractor trailer combination from the warehouse in Merced, CA to deliver meat, produce, dairy and home beauty care products to multiple locally owned supermarkets. I delivered to stores in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as other stores up and down California. After each delivery, I would 'clean up' the stores of cardboard bales and composting materials to bring back to the warehouse. My warehouse duties included unloading the 'store clean' up items mostly using electric pallet jacks and forklifts and occasionally help the warehouse crew load the trailers with product to be delivered. I maintained a class A drivers license and certificates required to operate the warehouse jacks and forklifts.

HCS was a credit card issuing facility. I was hired for my knowledge and expertise with a specific programming language called Easytrieve Plus. This programming language was used to create ad hoc reports mostly for the Marketing Department. I was also called upon to write programs that were installed into the credit card nightly processing system. Other duties included maintaining and installing nightly programs usually written in the COBOL and SAS programming languages. Job Control Language (JCL) was also required to be sufficient in. JCL controlled the programs for file input and output and directed the output to the proper storage medium, among other features.

This position was my entry level position to data processing. I worked as a warehouse employee before moving into a programming position with Fresno Fiserv. In the warehouse, my responsibilities were keep operations supplied with whatever they needed to continue the nightly process. I supplied them with printer paper and helped with hanging tapes when I was caught up with my other duties. The nightly process performed many tasks, one of which was to produce reports for the clients, Savings and Loan companies and Banks. I was required to break down the reports according to where they were to be shipped, package them for shipping and occasionally deliver them to the airport for shipping.

I eventually moved into a programming position. My duties as a programmer was to write programs to create ad hoc reports requested by other employees. Some of the requests were to install the programs into the nightly processing arena.

This section is to describe what I did after graduating high school 1969 and heading back to school in 1984. I worked various seasonal jobs that included the IRS, several wineries, a moving and storage company and maybe one or two other temporary jobs. I also toured Europe with a high school friend.

In 1984 I decided enough of that and with the encouragement of a friend, I went back to school to study Business Data Processing.