…in a word, rocked. In more that one word, it rocked the free world and parts of Communist China.
I have said it before, and I will probably say it again a few more times in the coming years, but I love my job. Quite simply, I absolutely adore the thing.
In between watching progress bars (a major part of my day some days) I sat and thought about how much I’ve learned since I started with this company three and a half years ago. My interview was an interview by firing squad: I sat at one end of the conference space table and four of the other guys sat around the other end and asked me a bunch of questions, most of which I answered “no” to. Had I ever redeployed a system? I had no idea what that meant. Have I had much experience with computers? Kinda, I mean, I had a Mac for three years before then, but I wasn’t delusional: Macs don’t ever see outfits like this, and Apple was only just barely becoming cool, so my experience in that arena accounted for virtually nothing. Had I ever reinstalled Windows before? Yes. Windows 95.
As I was told a few summers later, I was the only guy on the list, they needed help, and it seemed like I could learn pretty quickly. I had come there looking for work as a web designer and developer, but by the end of my second summer I knew that the website stuff would be a sideshow to this.
But in the last three years, I’ve learned a ton. I’ve redeployed hundreds of workstations, I’ve spent countless hours on the line with Dell technical support, I downgraded machines before OEMs offered to strip Vista off and put XP on for you at the factory, I’ve learned how to deploy servers and virtual machines, and I’m working on becoming a systems engineer. I can use a PC just as well as I can use a Mac, and thanks to Windows 7, I can actually enjoy using my PC (I wish Microsoft would have paid me for saying that, but the truth is, if you clean enough of the crap out of Vista and lay on top of it enough stolen features from OS X, it’s hard to not make something somewhat enjoyable)
Three and a half years of interning have come to an end. When I began, I was but the learner, now…I’m still the learner. But I’m at the point where I can answer a phone and not immediately hand the call off to someone at the help desk. I can actually solve problems, or do enough troubleshooting that my time isn’t completely wasted. It feels pretty good, and we’ve got enough projects coming up at work that I should stay pretty busy. I don’t know many people who would show up at 8 for work and leave happily at 7 that night, but it is an awesome feeling.
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