I started my career as an underwriter in an insurance company, with the side job of maintaining the Access 2.0 database (with a VB front end). After about 6 months in production I told management we would need to do something soon, as performance was starting to deteriorate, and at an increasing speed. For months they denied it would ever be a problem as their "highly paid consultants" said it would work fine for at least 5 years at the rate the AS/400 had been increasing the number of policies.

What they did not forecast was that the new system could give out quotes in 1/5th the time, causing us to get a lot more customers (we tripled the number of quotes we could do in a day the first week after the switch). After getting one of the network engineer to prove to the rest why it was getting slower the CIO turned to me "ok Anders, looks like you are right. What do we do?" At that point I was 6 months out of college, had never seen a professional relational database engine in my life. "Well, I hear about this new product called Microsoft SQL Server, I think we should look at it"

And that is how I became a SQL DBA. So while I do not like Access, I do owe my career to it 😉