What kind of jobs have I worked at?

Funny you should ask...

1. The first job I had; Wow, that was some time ago... I guess the first time I was paid money for my labors was when I entered the lucrative field of lawn care and maintenance. Yes, I cut lawns as a kid. There were two in our neighborhood that I cut regularly in addition to our own. My parents bought ME a lawnmower and I could use MY lawnmower any time I wanted to. Real character building stuff.
2. The second job was delivering newspapers. I rolled and throwed to our entire street and the apartment complex at the end of the street. It turns out that you can only fit six Houston Chronicles in the carrying rack on a Schwinn ® bicycle. This made for numerous trips back to the house.
3. I washed dishes at the Lamp of China. Finally a business that I could clean up in. My little brother also washed dishes there, but on the nights I was off. I was in the eighth grade and it was 1968. The proprietors couldn't understand that I preferred Chinese food and kept trying to feed me hamburgers (as a part of my evening wages).
4. I worked at Gardenland a nursery/lawn and garden center in Houston as a porter hustling plants out to folks cars, unloading trucks, watering plants etc.
5. I worked as a "gopher" for Ragland/Bishop Homes during my senior year in high school (1973). John Ragland was a general contractor and I sort of followed him around picking up boards and trash, and applying paint to interiors and exteriors of a neighborhood he was building.
6. I met an American Indian who was a painter while on the previous job and together we painted several things in Rogers Arkansas.
7. I graduated high school and moved back to Houston in 1973. I went to the Texas Employment Commission and got a job at American Aero Industries as a painter's assistant. Oscar Elezando, a middle aged Mexican was my boss. He taught me the fine art of spray painting cranes and other industrial equipment. I did a little sand blasting on the side when the paint shop wasn't busy. He used to say things like "Come here my son, you missed a spot". No matter how long or how thoroughly I painted, I always missed a spot. This is one of the lessons I learned while in my career as a protective coatings specialist.
8. I worked for a sub-sub-contractor pouring concrete around swimming pools for the sidewalks and patios. The cement truck would generally have to park in the street and the pools were generally in the back yard. This fact made me an uni-wheeled bulk transport operator.
9. I worked at another nursery bagging up dirt, hustling plants, delivering plants, and whatever they asked (water those trees). The manager would holler out to us "Hey porter", and my buddy on the job would say, "My names not Porter, is your name Porter?"
10. I worked at Nelson Tools a machine shop. I tried to learn the lathe to make thermo-wells. These were things made of specialty metals that went into tanks and pipelines to monitor product temperature. I could handle the precision but had difficulties with the timing. When you've got a piece of barstock in a lathe and the bar is bent, you've got to persuade it with a hammer by hitting it squarely on the "high" side. I had difficulty with this. '75
11. I decided that I was college material so I quit and enrolled in San Jacinto Jr. College. I worked at the school in the student union washing dishes. After two semesters there I decided to go to a real school and moved back to Arkansas to attend the University.
12. Delivered the Springdale Daily News to the Lowell Ark. post office, Daisy BB Gun, and 15 vending machines between Lowell and Rogers. This was on my daily commute from Fayetteville (U of A) to Rogers (home) so it was pretty convenient.
13. I then worked for Ragland/Bishop Construction again in Fayetteville Ark. I painted exteriors and interiors mainly, but also did whatever they asked, dig holes, break out concrete, pick up construction wastes, whatever...
14. I washed dishes at the student union (U of Ark.) between classes for Ms. Daisy. This was real sophisticated equipment compared to my earlier experiences at the Lamp of China, but basically it involved hosing off a bunch of other peoples food.
15. I also mowed lawns for a reduction in rent after I moved out of the dorm. I painted houses for my landlord (some of his other rental properties) for the same reason.
16. I built bridges with Barber Bridge Builders, well one any way. This involved digging in gumbo red regolithic clay with random chunks of chert dispersed throughout it), and moving a lot of concrete with a tool called a "come along". My bridge is the 112 overpass on the 71 by-pass around Fayetteville. When we were done, one of my jobs was to sweep the bridge with a broom from one end to the other, it took all day and I am still not sure why I had to do it. The damn thing was brand new and wasn't that dirty.
17. In 1978, I took my BS in Geology to Houston and got a job mud logging for The Analysts. Mud logging consists of periodically grabbing a sample of the drilling cuttings (that the drilling fluid or "mud" brings to the surface in the process of drilling an oil well) and analyzing them. We also kept track of rate-of-penetration, torque, gas in the mud, mud weight etc. This information is compiled into a running display per foot, or a log.
18. In 1980, I gained employment at Chevron. I've been there ever since.
1. I processed well logs for Aramco on the mainframe. Good old MVS, TSO, & JCL. We used to punch holes in cards for the JCL on directional survey jobs. There was a team of technicians on Westpark in Houston that used a package called MSP. We calculated shale volume, porosity, and water saturation. I made composite plots of lots of well information for the Sudanese Government. I worked on the field evaluation in Rio Zulia, Columbia and Akkrum, Netherlands.
2. IBM invented VM/CMS, the virtual machine. This allowed fast batch processing of logs; you could see the results that day, frequently within the hour. This caused our implementation of RWLS or the rapid well log system. I moved to New Orleans to provide support for that system. Our lab invented a structured programming language so that "flows" could be written that other folks could access, fill in the blanks, submit the jobs and view the plotted results. I wrote a bunch of these flows. My favorite set was to calculate abnormal formation pressure.
3. Someone decided to switch to decentralized computing so programs were written for interactive log correlation, cross sections, and mapping on a DEC micro-VAX (running ULTRIX, DEC's variant of UNIX). I was just the guy to support this product, and I did. I took four orange manuals home the weekend it arrived and was making accounts (user ids) the next Monday. Oh yea, it also allowed reservoir simulation and had tools for the pre and post processing of the data.
4. Then someone asked the question "Buy verses build?" so we bought. There is a company called Landmark that makes software that addresses many issues in the development of a geologic prospect. I provide support for numerous applications that run under their OpenWorks Oracle relational data base model. In essence we still correlate logs, make cross sections and make maps. I also support GoCad++, 3-D visualization software written by a consortium of oil companies and research institutions. This allows us to build and populate and earth model in preparation for reservoir simulation studies.