blog.serso.com

Soon after deciding to stay in Toronto, I spent a few weeks working as a car salesman. In fact, the owner of the car lot did like me because I could drive standard cars, whereas most people in Canada only drive automatic transmission. He specialized in luxury european cars such as BMW, Mercedes Benz and had a penchant for sports cars like Ferrari or Lamborghini.

So, I was a kind of savior for him for I could drive those cars, safely and without destroying their transmissions!

The pay was almost absent, because most of the commissions for sales I did at the stand did revert to more senior salespersons, and that was the actual reason why I gave up after 3 weeks there. Of course. I was working for peanuts and others were getting my money… typical!

But I did get to take those sport cars home and drive them around, so I had some fun, at least!

Back in 1994 when CompuServe was my internet provider, they offered me to have my own domain name, a still new-to-the-masses concept. For lack of imagination at the time, this was all that occurred to me. So, I have kept this domain name ever since. As it must be obvious, the “capitalization” used in SerSo was inspired in the way CompuServe was written…

Later on, I used the name SerSo.com for my business: a Toronto, ON, based ISP, which catered to the Portuguese speaking community, back in 1995. The service featured fast dial-up access, personal website, email, irc, usenet and more, and was commercialized through a flat rate, monthly subscription.

SerSo.com owed it’s existence to my idea of contributing to the community where I lived, and would never had existed without the efforts, dedication and expertise of Jean-Michel Dault who worked side by side with me for almost a year. He moved into Toronto, from Sherbrooke, QC, carrying his desktop computer and lots of enthusiasm.   I will always be grateful to him and will remember fondly those crazy times!…

Ever since that, I have been using the same name for several businesses until, finally, it became the domain name for my own site, alone. Now, it serves for my mail domain as well as site, blogs and other content that is professionally or personally related to me.

There are no plans to revive this name as a business name.

Yours truly,

-Sergio

In an effort to write chronologically about my past, for now I just wanted to go as far back as when I actually landed in Canada.

Officially, this was back in 1992. The fact is, I went there for a vacation and decided to stay.

The reasons for that decision aren’t as clear or straightforward as one might think. But I can summarize it as having been because I could find work in Toronto and because I had nothing to come back to, in Portugal, at the time

And the Canadian authorities quickly approved my application for residence, and that settled it. Thus started my adventure in North America that lasted for more than 10 years.

I did come back to Portugal, in 2000, but expectedly soon returned to Toronto and then to San Jose, California.

So, this is where the story, and a new career, started.