About my background and how it relates to patent searching, my
first paid work was as a paperboy for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in
the late 60s. My next job was as a janitor, dishman, potman
for Stouffer's Restaurant on Forbes Avenue. I even once made an
emergency tomato crate delivery on foot to the "Top of the Triangle" restaurant owned by Stouffer's Restaurant (yes, the VERY SAME "Stouffer's" that makes the frozen foods!) located at the top of the 64-story US Steel Building (now the USX Building that was then and still is the tallest building in Pittsburgh) a few blocks away on Grant Street, using a hand-dolly! In those days I was exposed to the wonderful architecture and rich history that made Pittsburgh a unique and very special city of steep hills, tight-knit communities and technological achievement that it still is today.
Then, after my first sophmore year at CMU, I worked as a quality control laboratory technician for a year at Neville Chemical Company located on Neville Island, just west of downtown. After this year, I went back to CMU to complete my degree requirements by 1980. In the summer of 1980, I went to work at Ohio Edison in Stratton, OH, as a fossil power plant performance engineer at the infamous Sammis Generating Station located next to the Ohio River, just north of Steubenville, OH (Dean Martin's home town). I worked there and at the Central Laboratory of Ohio Edison located in near Akron, OH, for about 4 years. Next, I went to work at General Physics in Columbia, MD, as a technical writer for about another 4 years, writing training courses for chemical laboratory technicians at fossis power plants, such as PEPCO in the Washington, DC, area.
I left General Physics in 1988 to start my own business, which I called CyberChem Company offering industrial training courses that I produced myself using a 286 PC and a Mac SE (at a local print shop) for drawings. I produced all materials, and was the instructor for two courses: "Demineralizer Operation and Performance" and "Distillation Fundamentals", which I plan to publish sometime later on the web. My business did not do well enough during those early years (mostly because I was too busy with my master's degree classes and graduate research assistant work at the University of Maryland, Reliability Engineering program), so that by 1990, I decided to join the USPTO as a patent examiner for the steady income, where I worked for nearly 11 years. I left them in April 2001 to start my own business again, this time I call it "SiberKhem" (a linguistic variation of the previous "CyberChem" which had been trademarked by a chemical producer in 1988) and here I am, having already survived more than 5 years (including the infamous 9-11 attack later in my very first year!). I am bringing together all of my past experience and business exposure to produce on-line training courses and to provide related patent services to the worldwide IP community.
