Happy memories! Including my first programming contract.
In high school, I ended up doing telephone survey work, mostly market research. We had to fill out these terrible timesheets so that clients could be billed for each call. Poking around, I discovered that the office had a PBX [1] to run all our phone lines. It was hooked up to a PC, and in the manual I discovered it would log every digit dialed, plus other events.
I talked my bosses into letting me mess with it. And then I convinced them to pay me some outrageous sum ($500, I think) to write Turbo Pascal software that would generate an automatic report every night replacing the timesheets. Given that I was making something like $5/hr (well above the $3.35 minimum wage), it seemed like a great double victory.
In high school, I ended up doing telephone survey work, mostly market research. We had to fill out these terrible timesheets so that clients could be billed for each call. Poking around, I discovered that the office had a PBX [1] to run all our phone lines. It was hooked up to a PC, and in the manual I discovered it would log every digit dialed, plus other events.
I talked my bosses into letting me mess with it. And then I convinced them to pay me some outrageous sum ($500, I think) to write Turbo Pascal software that would generate an automatic report every night replacing the timesheets. Given that I was making something like $5/hr (well above the $3.35 minimum wage), it seemed like a great double victory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_telephone_system#Priv...