Internet Janitor
It has been a long time.
The story I’m going to tell you is true. However, I am an unreliable narrator, and the truth is relative.
It all started back in 1997, when a young me, having no idea what I wanted to do with my life, was on IRC in the #vancouver channel one afternoon. Someone stated they loved their job, and for reasons I couldn’t possibly tell you, I sent a private message to them and asked where they worked and if they were hiring. As luck would have it, they were at an regional internet provider, or ISP for short. Of course, I knew what I was doing, of course I knew how to troubleshoot a Mac. Of course. I was interviewed by someone with one foot out the door already, who asked me no technical questions and hired me on the spot. Fantastic. Or terrifying. Yes, terrifying. I had no idea what I was doing. Also, given that I was the new guy, I was forced to take all the Windows 3.1 calls coming in. Even worse, on most days, I had to share a computer with someone else as one was always used all the time to burn pirated software.
This was the birth of my impostor syndrome. Which I still have to this day, it sits on my shoulder and looks like a tiny glowing blue hippo. Demons have many shapes—even cute ones. Don’t get too close. He bites.
I managed to climb the ranks, from technical support, to assistant webmaster, webmaster, call center manager and lastly system administrator. That last one was a bit of a stretch, but here we are, and I fumbled my way through learning Redhat Linux on old SPARC boxes from Sun. How did I do that? Well, and we’ll keep a few doors of what happened closed, but in short, I simply said yes to new things regardless of whether I felt I had a clue or not. Or perhaps I did? Damn hippo. I was good at figuring out things trial by fire style. I don’t recommend it. Did I mention I have anxiety?
I survived numerous mergers and acquisitions that occurred over the years, and then we were acquired by a larger regional ISP. Various assumptions were made (some of which were even true), and I found myself at another downtown office. The rest of the company was in another city, but thankfully, they had that downtown office, sparing me a three-hour commute in either direction. Because computers hate me, well, they hate us all, but most of all me, the web servers from the previous company steadily failed one by one. I should mention these are not like servers today. These were Compaq tower servers from the late 1990s and early 2000s, which required you to dismantle the majority of their insides just to access RAM or other vital components.
This really started my deep-seated hatred for the sound of a phone ringing. I found myself, on many occasions, in a car, at all hours of the night, thanks to a far too accommodating family heading to the server room. I can feel my anxiety rising thinking about it now.
Over time, the other office in the middle of nowhere closed and everyone moved into a new downtown office, which had the best view I’ve ever had from my desk. My coworkers were, for the most part, great people and patient beyond measure. Manager-wise. Oh, how to be diplomatic. Well, they were a mixed bag. There was the one with no understanding of how humans communicated, but somehow was the one who taught me the most. One whom I really enjoyed working with, albeit briefly and also spent the time to teach me a lot of what I know today. Then there was the one who, the more stressed they got, the more aggressive they became. Oh, and the one for whom I’ve never disliked someone more in my entire life. Not all bad, not all good, some downright evil. What a wild and crazy bunch.
Then a saviour came. A man with a wizard beard. Gandalf wishes he were him.
I was able to leave the 24/7 being on call behind me before it completely burnt me out any worse. It’s a hell of a thing not being able to relax for months on end because your phone might ring.
So I then moved to a start-up, a bunch of plucky up-and-comers who would blaze a trail of fierce independence until … they got bought by a larger company who immediately gave me six months’ notice. I felt a mix of relief that I could just zone out and utter paralyzing fear because that’s just how I roll. In the end, they needed to keep me, and that company set off to be the best they could be, to be pioneers in the enterprise software market … until they got bought by someone as well.
Make no mistake. I am where I am today because of the skills, patience, and not noticing I had no idea what I was doing, of other people. Without their support, this wouldn’t have been possible. No one should go through life alone, and I’ve made friends for life in this industry. My fair share of enemies, unemployed ones as well, but they were not the majority, just barely.
And that leaves me to the present day.
Given how the world is going, I’ll write another one of these in another 50 years and go into detail about my job being a shoe shine boy for our AI overlords.