A cool anniversary just passed yesterday.
10 years and 4 months ago I was managing a store in South St. Louis for the pink cellular carrier, and I saw my wages getting cut over and over due to bad tactics by the company. I mentioned this to a friend I was planting a church with, and he told me he worked in IT and extolled the wonders of working with computers. He encouraged me to get into the field of Information Technology. To sweeten the encouragement, he even offered to reimburse me for the costs of obtaining Security+, if I passed it on my first try.
Since I like challenges, and since it’s very less than ideal to see your income declining from barely making ends meet to not making them eat when you have a wife and baby at home, I bought a study guide and hit the books for a few weeks. Then I took the exam and passed it. My friend was good on his word and he reimbursed me.
Another friend informed me that his company was hiring for help desk technicians. He gave me the direct line of the recruiter. I called that guy every day for 3 weeks and left a voicemail repeating my desire for the job.
I got a call from the recruiter after a few weeks and he apologized for not calling sooner; he had been on vacation! Whoops! He liked my eagerness, and he scheduled me for an interview.
Thankfully I did well and got the job.
Since then I’ve done help desk, application support, and sysadmin stuff. It’s been a good ride so far!
I’m not a graybeard yet. Wait, I do have a little gray in my beard, I guess.
10 years later, though I don’t interact with end users very much anymore , and though I work a lot with vSphere, other hypervisors such as QEMU and Hyper-V, networking, storage, I still reach into the back pocket for that old troubleshooting tool every now and then:
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
The vWebster Writes About Technology 