Born and raised in a small northern Michigan town, and obviously, a huge UofM fan - Go Blue!  After college, I moved to the Detroit area where I got my first taste of the corporate world.  It was here that I started my career doing EDI and integrating that into Oracle Applications (that was when it was still character based lol).  It was here that I learned about Oracle and relational databases.

From there, I moved to Sunny California and worked for Western Digital and Cap Gemini.  This is where my Oracle knowledge really took traction.  I slowly moved away from EDI and became more of a PL/SQL interface guru for importing/exporting into Oracle Apps.  After a couple independent consulting stints, I came to Quest in 2000.  It was then, that I learned about Toad and it was all over from there - I was hooked!  I found out that all the SQL commands that I had memorized over the years, I could just flush and free up brain memory space for other things, because Toad did them all for me.

My story doesn't end there tho, because I was in an interesting situation.  I worked for the company that made my favorite application, but at the same time I was a user of the product as well.  This was an interesting dynamic, and one that I really enjoyed.  After 4 or 5 years in California, I decided it was time to move to the East Coast.  It was by complete coincidence that Quest had an office where I wanted to move, and it just so happened that it was the office where Toad was produced.  I was ecstatic.  When I got to Cary, I was surprised about how small the Toad development team really was, not to mention, how very welcoming and friendly everyone was.  I continued on working for our internal IT Oracle Apps team for another 5 years, using Toad as my personal assistant.

But yet the story continues.  I had made many friendships with the Toad team over the years.  An opening for a Support/QA person opened and I got a call one day asking if I was interested.  I jumped at the opportunity, even tho it was a complete career change, which for anyone that has done that knows, can be a bit scary.  After a year or so, I transitioned into full time Quality Assurance for Toad, and it's one of the most rewarding jobs of my career.  I can honestly say it's the best job I have ever had, and it's because of the people I work with and I get to work to constantly improve, what I think, is one of the best software products on the planet.