My first “real job” where I wasn’t delivering pizza or mopping the floors – even though I did mop the floors from time to time. I was tasked with preparing art files for film output with various methods. I’ll spare you the minute details of all that for a few reasons. Chiefly that I don’t remember a lot of the details – it’s been over a decade. The second is that you’d go into a coma if I blithered on about dot screens and flexographic distortion.
I can legitimately say that I was a ‘Mac user’ back when Apple was doomed. Most of my work was done in QuarkXPress 3.3 and Adobe Illustrator 6/7 with a smattering of Photoshop thrown in. From day one I learned a lot at this job, not all of it technical. It was a hard gig being a fresh faced kid in an office where most of your coworkers are a decade older than you.
Regularly I was pulling film canisters out of imagers and running them through the developer. After that it was separating the film jobs into batches to be checked on a light table and bagged up for the customer or other department.