This isn\’t about getting your daily exercise, though that\’s important…
But rather about military exercises or training, lol.
I\’ve already revealed one job I had during high school – taking care of the animals in the biology lab.
But I had another one as well my junior and senior years of high school.
I was able to work on the base (Patch Barracks) in exercise department of HQUSEUCOM (Headquarters of the US European Command).
I worked there all day during the summers and after school during the school year.
I was assistant to the secretaries there.
We worked on (practically unrecognizable these days) computers designed for word processing.
No such thing back then as WYSIWYG or drag and drop (in fact no such thing as a mouse so there was nothing to drag with). The word processing program would probably be practically unrecognizable these days too lol.
We did have floppy disks – big 10 inch disks that probably most people have never seen. (I had a 5-3/4 inch floppy disk drive for my home computer.)
And we had huge dot matrix printers.
The picture above isn\’t quite like the computers we used (they were bigger actually and black, not white), but it\’s the best representation of a 1980s type computer that Graiphics could come up with for me.
Everything we did in that office was classified. So I had to get a security clearance before I could work there. I was approved for it, obviously, so I got to work in the office
The fact that I already had a security clearance made it much easier to find a good job in the summer times during college as well. But that\’s for a future post :).
My dad\’s office was also on the base, but I couldn\’t work there because everything they did was Top Secret or higher and I was too young to get anything above a Secret security clearance. But we were able to commute together which was why I was able to take the job and I was able to go in the building where he worked because I had a clearance.
The exercise department did a lot that was Top Secret and above too, so they had to be careful that I didn\’t see or hear that stuff, but there was enough Secret and below that they could put me to work.
I learned a lot there about such things as how organizations work and were structured – especially military organizations, but a lot of it applies outside the military too.
