I love it when I get a message or error at work that tells me “Contact your system administrator” or “Contact your local IT department”. That’s me. It’s telling me to contact myself. I’m that guy. That’s when I say “Ok, Jim, help me out here.” and I’ll talk to my self about it. Usually, surprisingly, that even works. I’ll think about the issue more in-depth, consider any options I hadn’t thought about initially, try whatever I can, and I’ll often be able to work through it.

The last time I remember being on the other side of that fence was when I was in college at Gateway Tech. Back then we wrote computer programs by typing each line of code on a punch card. Holy crap, am I ancient or what?! Anyway, the punch machines (each the size of a small desk) would sometimes jam or things wouldn’t work right, and I remember having to get IT help with that. Then there’s also the fun and embarrassment that ensues when you drop your huge stack of punch cards and your program becomes this mixed up mess of cards all over the floor…and they had to be in perfect sequential order in order to be read into the mainframe computer correctly. Oh joy. Oh, and I remember the one time I got a huge program punched, fed into the mainframe, then waited as it got stuck in a loop and halted everyone else’s programs as well as holding up everyone else in line behind me that needed to feed and run their programs until I was able to find an IT guy who could halt my program so I could go back and figure out what was wrong with it and re-punch the lines of code I needed to fix. Ah, the good ole days. Those programs were written in COBOL, by the way… the “COmmon Business-Oriented Language”. It was almost as easy to learn as BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) and I enjoyed learning it. This was in 1983. After graduating with an Associate Degree I had difficulty finding my first IT job, so I ended up taking a Security Guard job that lasted for 5 years at AMC/Chrysler. Things started looking up after that when I landed a Lab Technician job at ITO Industries, a circuit board manufacturer located in Bristol, WI, then eventually went to work for another circuit board shop in Gurnee, IL, and finally transitioning to an IT position after being a Lab Technician there for a few years. Ah, geek problems.