Venture Into It

Who knows how long it will take to complete but it's kind of fun diving into my mind to see how this all came to be. Maybe you enjoy it, maybe you don't or maybe you learn something. I don't know but enjoy ~ It all starts somewhere, and it started for me back in 2007 with nothing to do out of High school.

Having spent a lot of my youth playing PC games and tinking with old computers why not get into what you "love". Memories of my Dad killing his back doing hard labor his whole life, it seemed like a good idea to maybe just maybe not get my hands dirty. Though not really understanding that it's still a service job and you still get dirty, it's just with mess of dust and the stress of the unknown (mostly printers).Almost 20 years in IT and they still cannot write solid printer drivers.

I enroll into Lincoln tech with the system administrator class. Which now looking back is a very odd time to get into IT. The Windows server 2003/XP era still being very fresh in everyone's mind and still being very afraid of virtualizing your whole environment. Most of what they taught in those classes I suppose even by 2007 was a little dated and not much of it was centered around virtualization.

Lots of changed now and they even test for Virtual related topics on the A+. The big thing was learning how to subnet on paper, a very "useful" skill that we spent a lot of time on. I will say, they drilled the OSI model into my head and that has been the basis for everything I troubleshoot.

A main selling point of this so-called tech school was the ability for them to assist you with building a resume and preparing for interviews. None of which they did a very good job on and seems like most I went to class with didn't end up sticking with IT. They would bring in a generic person to talk about resume building and interviews though nothing specific to our role. Getting grilled on highly technical questions on a job interview wasn't something they warned you about.

Maybe not all are that bad though my experience has been very impersonal with them and getting thrown into job interviews that are either way above me, too far or not specific to IT. Very possible I was just seen as a young kid and maybe trying to land a 9-5 office job with no real experience wasn't going to be very easy. Stuck in a hard place where no one really hires low to train high anymore, you need to keep moving around jobs to gather experience and get that almighty raise. This becomes a common theme of my early career, if you want more money and responsibilities then you need to find a new job. Possible it's just an effect of looking for jobs with small business.

Well, you look at the Best Buy geek squad. Didn't learn very much at all from this other than building a solid tool set for basic things. The job was more focused on selling anti-virus and removal bundles for $299 than actually doing any IT work. When a virus removal was sold, we just connected to the PC to some remote outsourced company which we called Johnny Utah who would do "something" with the PC and then hand it back. No one I worked with really had any passion for IT or wanted to do anything serious with it. Fair enough, really this was job with a slightly higher paying retail role that kept you off the floor and out of a generic Best Buy shirt.

The idea of someone buying a PC two days ago, closing the lid with a lighter inside and cracks the screen. Then you bring it to Best Buy stating you "just woke up and it was like this" and demand a return /exchange. Smile, take the PC into the back, take a few deep breaths as you know you need to walk back out and tell them it's dead / uncovered, not free to fix. Oh laptop doesn't power on? Bring it in the back, pop open the cover and see water damage. Take a deep breath, gather your thoughts and then walk out to tell the person the bad news. Which most of the time they take as a direct insult, surely, they would know it had water damage and you insult their intelligence by even mentioning that it might very well been them who broke it. Though it's probably not that at all and acting clueless / angry when confronted with your lie is probably a higher chance of said lie working in your favor.

You learn good customer service skills as you deal with people and the lies they have for what they did to their PC. I don't know, maybe people do the same thing to the doctor when they need to admit what they did to their body that causes these problems. You really start to learn the deep negative relationships people have with this very confusing thing they're forced to use. Computers work in very specific ways, a step of processes that you must follow, or they instantly blow up. They are complex and designed to be only understood by engineers. They engineers feel bad for us and design a very flaky UI that is very moody. When in reality the most "user friendly" OS is actually the most cryptic to use and troubleshoot. The idea of a mystery computer that is full of hidden code is purely a Microsoft idea rammed in our minds (more on that later). In the middle of all this you need to become the friendly face to bridge the gap and be the friendly face to their problems without hitting their ego too hard with "Oh you been doing this the wrong way the whole time".

Yea I really didn't learn much at all in the tech realm. Though I did learn how to work in a fast paced IT shop, how to interact with people with computer related topics without sounding too condescending and how to tell people bad news without also sounding too condescending. Though in the end its still a retail job, you still need to work black friday and you still need to go on the floor to sell laptops and you still work in a place full of high school drama. So after 2 years I started looking again and landed a sweet gig at a non profit. I'll end this venture here and continue in the next post, whenever that might be.