This is a series of posts about my journey so far. You can read the previous entries at:

The Story So Far… (Part 1)

Last time on Darrell Tang Z. Darrell obtained his CCNA certification!

Wayfinding

Two years later, I moved on to a mixed Network Engineer & VoIP Technician position at a large enterprise corporation that was migrating from an analog phone system to a new Cisco VoIP system housed in the corp HQ. I had the Right Stuff™️. They needed someone to help with the day-to-day of configuring switch ports on Cisco equipment AND deploying Cisco VoIP phones for users. Incidentally, I picked up skills to manage analog phone lines, tracing and punching down the miles of 2 pair wire that snaked throughout the 2 campus locations I worked at. It was great while I was learning but it quickly became apparent that enterprises need hands to grease the wheels, not mess with the not-broke. I quickly soaked up the majority of job duties and the learning slowed to a crawl.

The discontent really manifested when I poked my head up from underneath a desk, to which I had just connected a new phone, and the user, standing at the cubicle entrance asked, "Hey, the new keyboard they gave me doesn't work. Can you fix that?".

The Flashback

At 14 years old, I was reading a local computer magazine that advertised prices for hardware with my best friend. We marveled together at the 4.3GB IDE hard disk that had just been released. Not the least for the price of that gargantuan amount of storage. We dreamt of how many .wav files of songs we could fit on it.

I had my own computer at 16 years old. This was back in 1999 so most families had just a Family Computer (a completely foreign concept nowadays, with our handheld supercomputer/camera/music player/video player/etc. devices).

My father was a one-man-break-fix IT company. At 17 years old, I was traveling with him to medical office clients and installing Microsoft Office XP on nurse workstations. By 19, I was deploying workstations for new offices, configuring IPs, installing Office versions, joining Active Directory domains, and configuring networked printers & print servers from soup to nuts.

All of this to say that I had plugged in a few keyboards in my time. This was typical Desktop Support work after all.

Part 3 next time! Keep learning and keep growing!

Darrell