Well, it was a small company, a Yellow Pages ad agency. At the time "cut and paste" mostly meant "scissors and glue". The owner's idea was to automate the process of designing, billing, placing, and accounting for advertising. He ended up with a program that scripted Photoshop and Pagemaker and created layouts on the fly, including rate cards and all the other paperwork then required. This was in the early 90s.

At the time I wanted to be an illustrator and calligrapher, if you can believe that. Half of the day I spent managing the phone book library. We had a subscription to every book in North America, something like 8,000 volumes.

The other half I spent more or less dicking around, doing creatives for the ads, special projects for sales, tinkering with layouts, reading manuals, and teaching myself about design theory and how to use the whole Adobe suite.

We were paid minimum wage for 25 hours a week, so I don't think us kids were a huge burden on the business. And we all turned in useful work. My high school had a program that gave us school credit for working, as long as we took core classes and stayed employed.