My first experience of work was at a local video rental business.

When I was young, I was always running to rent movies from our local video rental shop. One day when I was there to rent some, it was taking a long time to check out. There was a line of people in front of me waiting, as the business owner painstakingly wrote the movie rentals of the current customer down by hand in his log.

Since I was learning database programming at the time, it easily came to my attention that this local video shop was (still) keeping track of rentals via a written accounting style journal. While I waited, I began to figure out a more efficient system of tracking these rentals. With my relatively new relational database programming skills, I figured I would be able to help him be quicker and more efficient – and perhaps even more accurate – with a software-based system. As my turn approached, I asked the business owner if I could come in the next day to talk to him about his rentals, and he agreed.