1969/73
I joined IBM in The Netherlands as a call dispatcher on the newly created trouble desk for mainframe customers. There were not that many mainframe systems in the Netherlands, so we did it all, from punch card stations and RAMAC units through to (eventually) the 360/65. For me, it was a way to get into the nascent computer industry without getting a "computer degree" - other than cybernetics, there wasn't that much "computer" you could study in college, at the time. Over the years, I greedily took courses in everything from systems engineering and flowcharting to SNA, and even learned to program machine language on our Service Bureau systems. I left behind a computerized trouble tracking system based on mark sensing punch cards running on a 360/20 I had access to in the Service Bureau downstairs, in a department that had grown from four to around thirty people.
I left for the Amsterdam media world, where I'd had connections for some time, as my then wife was a ballerina, and Holland is a very small country. A few years later, I did a brief stint at IBM U.K. Ltd., where in Chiswick I put in the same tracking system for London I had put together in Amsterdam.