Steve Bryant came up with the excellent idea of August 1st being designated How I Got Started In ColdFusion Day. I don't have a great story but its a story nonetheless:
I had ended up in limbo after college in the summer and trying to find a job with computers but where I live there isn't too much around. When I finally found a job it was only part-time and all I did was literally feed paper into a A1 printer and prepare some packs to go out for a company that was starting up a pub guide. Don't get me wrong, working the hours 9am-1pm over summer was awesome and at the age of 20 when pint only cost £1.74 and a pack of 20 cost £2.70ish I was pretty happy. Needless to say come the good weather, beer gardens, and friends in the same position I was spending what I had just earned in the afternoon. Not really a career path, but it was fun!
The company was actually creating a community driven pub-guide site but in reality they didn't actually have the skill set and the time because the truth of the matter is that it was "I know what we need on the web" idea from MD of a company thats business was tenant referencing, insurance, rent warranty, debt recovery etc. They had been using Allaire ColdFusion v4.2 and Microsoft Access (the setup that everyone was using at that time from the other posts I'm reading) on some other internal sites so they got up and running easily enough but they just didn't have all the resources.
I can't remember who approached who but in short I had about a month to learn CFML and if I was good they'd take me on full time (and my beer and cigs afternoon would come to an end). Well after getting the dev edition, some books ordered and a few late nights I had found out how easy it was to connect a DB to a database and the rest is history.