Most emphatically, do any and everything you can to take a job with Shell. You will know your first day as the opening of a door that will take you on most of a lifetime of ever growing personal insight, discovery of strengths you never knew you had as well as honing new skills to face challenging adventures.

No big mistakes, evidenced by my working 35 years for the company.

The most stressful day for me was seeing the instant a company wide application that was already about fifteen years old and facing Y2K come to life after being killed by the milllennium turnover . The software was old and the application was huge - meant to keep the company's plant, property and equipment books containing records for several billions of dollars worth of stuff in pristine shape for the regulators (FERC). The project required review and corrections to what seemed an infinite amount of program code and when I made it back to work early on that first day in January 2000, I took a deep breath and turned the computers on. No one knew for sure that all the changes would work, having such a short time to find, fix and test them all for there were so very many. When the system did start up, it was like the thing taking it's first breath in the new century. To my surprise and relief, it started up...it lived! - and went on to live another ten years or so - Quite a very long time for such a giant complicated set of computer code to survive and continue being useful and productive.

I recall very few instances where co-workers or customers in my corner of the company became angry with me or vice verse. We were well trained on how to deal with disagreements when they occurred. Win - win, was the objective. There were always more that one way to do things.

The work I and others with me did, was intellectually difficult and left little time for fooling around. Simply put, we loved the challenges because they were not easy. They were the most difficult and thus success meant much more than dealing with mundane day to day activities. We each took on the most difficult and found we had few limits to what we could do. For myself, thirty years or so of learning new skills every day was a noble goal. Not to mention that those skills were always quickly transferred to others on the staff. For this reason, not just I, but many others found working for Shell to be a lifetime benefit.

My skills at Shell Oil Company and various of its subsidiaries were marked by a native ability to plan, organize and work with teams of other similarly skilled co-workers to plan, develop and operate large platform financial and other software for the company. The major projects we addressed usually took months to a year or so to complete. The work was definitely not physical, but required considerable thought and attention. In that realm, it was hard work - very hard. Everyone involved had ideas and desires as to outcomes which sometimes led to a bit of friction, but we were at the same time always able to grasp the task at hand and work together to get the projects done. Virtually all turned out to be jewels for the company. They included financial applications of different kinds - in house, purchased (OGIS, SAP and others)They were all hard. I and all the others took these projects on by choice and because they were hard and saw success in each and every case. The credit goes to the teams I worked as cohesive groups of trained determined individuals whose wish was to work to the best possible outcome. After all Shell was and is one of the finest companies on the planet. We were proud to be a part of it and wished to keep it so.