As everyone who follows me on any of my networks knows, I’ve been working a lot lately and spending a lot of late nights in server rooms, on conference room floors and killing my cell phone’s battery with long, fruitless and hardly coherent tech support calls to somewhere in india.  My position at this company isn’t Systems Administrator, nor is it Systems Engineer.  Yea, I’m just a lowly end-user support technician making less than a kindergarten teacher and serving as the IT scapegoat.

So why the hell am I doing these things?  Why haven’t I quit and gone on to find a new job who will fund their IT department and hold the Sys Admin responsible for the rat’s nest of cat5 ethernet, fibre channel and ill-configured services fighting for control over our SAN environment? Here’s why:

When I made the decision to drop out of music school and become a glorified digital custodian I knew I was going to be in for some rough times.  I’ve lost friends and girlfriends over my dedication to what I do and sometimes over the effects of the sometimes thankless job on my attitude.  I am doing this because I am passionate about what I do.  I’m addicted to the high.  Like a lab rat systematically making it’s way through a maze to get to the cheese at the end, I am working through increasingly more complicated mazes in search of bigger pieces of cheese.  Whether that cheese is a metaphor for the look of awe on the user’s face when you fix their problems with what looks to them like a magic spell, or the satisfaction you get when you see the script you just wrote send 1’s and 0’s flying gracefully across the screen just the way you intended them to, that high keeps me looking for the next project that will get me even higher.

(sorta interesting I happen to be born in the year of the rat)

The bottom line is, people are noticing.  The good people anyways.  The director of IT recognizes all of this, the assistant to the CFO apparently notices and the rest of the people I respect do too.  You have to stand out  in this industry to be more than a code monkey or digital custodian and I aim to be the prize at the bottom of the box.  This is a really exciting time in computing and IT workers like me get to be the gatekeepers.  I’m not about to blink and miss it.

For beta or worse, I’ll be right here. Soaking it up, taking my notes and uploading every artifact that I can use to prove I was here and it was strange and at least somewhat exciting.