I figured this thread existed, never found it though!
I'm 43, grew up in rural Minnesota, far from the city scene but we all had boxes. Always quite a few on the bus and on our desks.
I had electronics class in high school grades 9-12, and an old guy in town who ran his own battery tester business was keen on this, and would come by looking for cheap labor every now and then. My buddy took a position there doing schematic transfers from paper to computer, and being the lazy ass he was, he quit, so I took his job. After doing that for a bit I spent a couple years doing every random job - stuffing boards, winding transformers, fabricating chassis, making blueprints, kitting in the stockroom, making boards in the darkroom... I ended up settling into updating board designs done with tape on a light table into a CAD system. 23 years later I'm still designing them, now at Intel's server group.
Wow man, nice to hear the back story. Everyone has a back story!