FKI
FireKing International. That's my employer. A few of my readers might not know that. Now you do. LOL. I'm between projects for xanga publication so today I've got nothing in particular to post. So I'm going to take a few minutes and talk about my day to day work. First, a little about the company. FireKing was founded in the early 50's by the grandfather of our current owner/CEO. FireKing (as a brand) makes fireproof file cabinets and sells through the office products industry. About 15+ years ago the company expanded into fireproof safes when it purchased the Meilink (pronounced: my-link) safe company. In the late 90's the owner partnered with (ie funded) a couple of bright engineers to develop a surveillance video recording machine that was PC based. It was one of the first security DVRs and it is known as an Image Vault DVR. With great success in the world of technology, FireKing soon acquired another safe company, NKL, because NKL was the leading maker of "intelligent" safes. The safes themselves were "cookie cutter" design and most of the fast food companies were buying them. The intelligent lock was a good design (and we still use it). NKL already owned two other companies. The one which made security door hardware we sold and the other was another safe company, Gary Safe. Gary made a wide variety of custom safes, but it was particularly interesting to us because they made a product called the Autobank. It was a safe which had bill validators (like on a pop machine) and could vend out tubes of change and it could do all of the accounting for these functions. It sounds good on paper, but the product itself was a technological dog. So, after the aquisition, we took what was good on paper and devoted huge engineering resources to start over again with a new and hopefully good design. The Autobank we market today under the NKL name is a very cool and vastly better product. Over the last 3 years we have purchased three other safe companies. Our company now sells safes through various market channels under a total 7 brand names, fireproof files, and digital video recorders. Besides manufacturing, we have also expanded our services to include factory employee service techs across the US. We can service our own product and in southern California we are actually offering full locksmithing services. It is awkward to compete with our contracted service providers who in some cases are also our dealers, but it seems to be working. Go figure.

Professor
I wear several hats including training, web development and maintenance, and technical writing. Training: I train locksmiths how to program and service cash handling safes. I also train sales folks and integrators how to spec out, install, configure and operate our Image Vault DVR. I run two regular schools - one for safes and one for Image Vault. The safe class is two days and the video class is one day. Taken as a whole it is called FireKing University and as instructor I've acquired the nickname "Professor." Web: I'm the webmaster for our numerous public URLs. We have another fellow here in the IT department who handles the internal stuff. He's better with code, but since I know the product and I'm pretty good with sticking to graphic standards and public communication I stick to the public stuff. Writing: Technical writing covers a lot of ground and it includes everything from proofing (and sometimes creating) ad slicks to writing product operation, service, and installation manuals. I develop help files for our DVR and safe support software. I also develop in part or whole various interactive demonstrations or training applications used on our web site or on CDs distributed with product. If the public sees it, odds are pretty good I was involved to one degree or another. I primarily use Adobe software products and consider myself pretty well versed in Dreamweaver, InDesign (and PageMaker), Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, Captivate, and RoboHelp. I own Flash, but frankly I have no idea how to use it. I have a small library of other software apps besides the obligatory MicroSoft Office suite, but let's not go there. Taken on the whole my jobs of writing, web work, and training make a great combination. I started out in Tech Support so I know the product quite well and have a heart for service. The biggest problem is there's only one of me. Very few people in our organization, even within the sales department, know both the safe and video sides of the business.

If you didn't know the entomology of my xanga identity before, now you do. Thanks for tuning into my infomercial. And now I return you to your regularly scheduled blogging.