Sandon Construction known for their road building, concrete and extruded concrete products. Herb Sandon owner of Sandon Construction was a good friend and father-in-law. I worked for Sandon Construction part time for more than 10 years. I would fill in weekends, evenings or whenever I was not working another position.
One day while working on Herb’s CPM computer (pre Microsoft) I began to see a need for Job Costing as his accounting system did not track job information. I spent my spare time over the next few months to design and write a program that would gather information from accounts receivable and accounts payable and gather job costing information. I added fields in both accounts payable and accounts receivable to accommodate job codes.
In 1982 I took a leave from Industrial Wood Products to work on a large concrete pouring project that Herb was working on. Sandon Construction had been awarded the contract to place all the concrete on main street in Kalispell Montana. This was a big project and a short time frame. I worked as a concrete finisher. My day would be coming at 5am and lay out flower planter rings, street sign posts, street lamp posts, parking meter posts and anything else the engineers would throw at me. 6am the remaining finishers would show up and I would stand in concrete with a shovel and rake till 2pm. Once all the sidewalks were poured I was assigned to the main portion of the street project where I would come to work at 6am, shovel concrete till 2 pm. I would come back at 10pm and run a concrete saw till 2am. Some weeks I worked more than 80 hours.
While working for Sandon Construction I operated concrete saws, jack-hammers, backhoe, dump truck, motor grader and computer.