The company I worked for during this time was American Telnet. The company doesn't exist anymore, but it was a telephone based entertainment company. Psychics, adult themed operators and custom programmed surveys. At the beginning, my job was to enter names and addresses that were left by customers of the lines to join a membership.
One of the functions that I did while entering that information was to flag obvious children (or folks who would simply yell expletives at the recording prompt). After doing this for a few months, the membership program was shut down. However, they changed to recording just the caller saying their name and had me listen to those. I didn't need to type the name, just listen and hit the delete key if the recording wasn't acceptable. My job had been condensed to three buttons: reject, replay and next.
This company had a large library of technical manuals on the shelves. So, while I was sorting voices, I started reading. I learned about private exchange telephone switching, and the technical details behind how multiple phone conversations run across the same four wires at the same time. I even learned the bit-format of analog to digital conversion using Pulse Code Modulation (PCM), the same technology used to store music on CD.
I had been working there for somewhere around 8 months at this point, and I started thinking it would be nice if I could move up. I looked back on how much I had always admired computers from afar, and noticed that the guys who did computer programming didn't seem that much smarter than me. I also noticed that those guys could afford to own and drive cars. Not fancy cars, but I was riding a bicycle or a bus.
That company did most of their computer programming in C, so I figured that is what I should learn. I started a journey to try to learn about computer programming in C.
After I had been doing this reading for about four months, whenever something went wrong, the IT people would start asking me if I had been messing with anything. At this point, I hadn't read about the computers or computer networks, but they saw me studying technical manuals, and just got suspicious. I took this as gentle teasing, and I became friends with some of them.
I was living with a roommate and that roommate fell behind on rent, and one day suggested giving me a used computer instead of rent money. He didn't have the money, and he knew that I had been wanting a computer. Having no idea what I was going to end up with, I agreed (knowing I'd get nothing, otherwise). The computer had an i286 CPU, and a 15 MB Hard Drive, and it ran DOS 3.1. There's also a chance that it had been stolen, but I didn't ask. At the time, Pentium processors (3 generations later) had already been released, but any genuine Intel computer was a huge step up from nothing.