A great thing began happening in the valley around the time that I lost my position at Woodcraft. The pace of employment opportunities began to speed up. Unlike the two years that I had been trapped in retail, there were jobs appearing again in the technology sector. Soon after I was freed from Woodcraft, I got a call from a local QA contracting house. I worked for them for about a month. The pay there sucked, but I knew that going in. It was still better than Woodcraft. They were important to my future because they got recent tech work back onto my resume. It was most fortuitous that I was able to get the job. I worked there for about a month, until they ran out of work for me and we parted ways.

Just after the contracting firm ran out of work for me, I got a call from an old friend. There was a QA contract available in the company that she worked for and I could have it if I wanted. Once again, the pay was less than I would have liked, but still better than the place before. Finally, I was getting a wage that I could live on with a certain level of comfort. I admit it, I was delighted to have another job doing QA. I looked for the opportunity to improve my skills, to once again become a good QA guy. I was hungry! I went in and interviewed for the position. I was accepted for the job, and have been working with iterations of the same company ever since.

For six months, I worked for Sentius Corp. I worked on both a new prototype project for a large maker of cell phones and a legacy product that the company had been working on for many years. The concepts from the prototype would soon be used for larger purposes. My friend, who was the CTO of Sentius, formulated a architecture for mobile search that is unique in the current cellular world. It was different enough from the technologies of the older Sentius corp that it was deemed provident to spin it off. A new company was formed, MCN-Inc. We were all fired from Sentius and hired by MCN. It was a bit of business magic. The people were the same, but the company name had changed. We focus on a niche market that has huge potential.

We do federated search.We take a different tack from a yahoo or a Goggle. We work with the telco to create a custom portal for their corporate page. We federate the results from a group of content providers. They give us the partners that they want us to work with our technology searches each source and aggregates the results to a page. It actually is pretty cool. We tend to do fairly spare layouts, thus allowing easy navigation on the tiny screen of a cell phone.

MCN is a young company. We are nimble and eager to make the customers happy. Our basic premise of aggregating and delivering effective search results from multiple sources is appealing to the Telecommunications types. They can work with partners that they have business relationships with and we can help everyone do business. We have recently been doing work for companies in both Europe and Asia. Actually pretty cool. I am having to learn a lot of new skills to work effectively in my QA functions. It has been gratifying to see myself gaining skills and exercising them.

I hope that working at MCN will allow me to make enough money to not only enjoy life, but also to be able to save a bit. I am painfully aware that I don't have near the amount of money saved to make retirement possible, much less feasible.