Upon returning from a half-year sabbatical in Canada, I was glad to be tapped for my first job as a Tester / QA by Riot Entertainment Ltd.
At the time the company produced SMS-based games, similar to rock-paper-scissors. You'd send "XMEN A" and that A would be your choice in the game of X-Men, and you'd get a response as to how you were doing. But sometimes you'd get "Service not available" — that's when I'd spring into action and restart the application. That was my job at first: I had about six handsets with SIM-cards from various mobile operators, playing the games and restarting them if they had crashed. For that I also carried a laptop with a cellular PCMCIA card, whipping it out anywhere from the metro to restaurants and cafés.
That wasn't enough. I was fairly fast at it, so I branched out to updating the Lord of the Rings Content Management System with additional content and grammar fixes. I was eventually connected to the actual SMS delivery system and monitored it directly, connecting to servers in London and Singapore and manually restarting the games.
Things came to a head when Riot-E were about to do something Nokia said was impossible — launch an SMS game via fifteen different mobile operators in different countries, during Christmas. I was roped in to sit at home and make sure they all worked. They did. Then I was put in charge of single-handedly monitoring through all of the Christmas holidays, New Year's Eve and the day afterwards.
I also built and maintained an Excel sheet of the SIM-cards, PIN/PUK codes of various European mobile operators, and documented the process of setting up and maintaining the autonomic monitoring system. Riot Entertainment ceased business in April 2002 and had to lay me off.