Don't let it get you down.

I was working nights at a gas station at QT...

I applied to a software company and during the interview, I thought it went pretty well - of course, I hadn't slept at all and probably looked like absolute shit as you can imagine.

They called me back a few days later and told me they had decided to hire someone internally.

I was pretty crushed, but I just said "Okay, thank you for your consideration."

About a week later, they called me back and asked me if I was still interested in the position a new one had just opened up.

I got an offer letter for more than I asked for - I was ecstatic.

I have been here 3 years now and it's the best job I have ever had. I can't sing the praises of my manager enough - such a cool guy to work for.

In my department, it was mostly data entry type work. We do data migration, so we were mostly copying and pasting things into excel.

I don't have a college degree, but I have been programming since I was 9 years old. I learned VBA and within a couple months had automated the majority of my job. I was offered a position on a "special projects" team that consisted of one 60+ year old VBA programmer.

He and I now write VBA utilities to automate a majority of the data that we hand off (nobody lost their jobs over the automation - each migration has to be carefully reviewed - this was something I considered when writing it).

Now, he and I wrote VBA all day and parse incoming data. There are thousands of different types of reports that are thrown at us on a daily basis (including scanned copies of reports).

It's the kind of job that you will never be able to fully automate, but we have done a nice job of writing utilities that are able to determine what report it is, and if we have seen it before, to pull rules for it and even (in some cases) parse it automatically.

Anyway, the main point I was making is that even though I went back to cleaning coffee grounds and hating my life that very same day, a week later my life completely changed. That's exactly how it will happen for you if you don't give up.