While I’m sure you folks that understand this stuff have made in the order of 100x the amount of money I have made over 40+ years of working, I somehow feel, while my work can be dirty, tiring, and sometimes frustrating, it is much more basic, and solving the problems I am presented with are very analog, eg; find the broken wire, replace the malfunctioning device, or my favorite, blame the user…. A much easier way to get by.
I know, if I had went down the path of computer systems, IT, etc., I would have been good at it, as I know my mind works that way, and there was computer lab in my school, which I did for 3-4 semesters, but in 1983-1984, they were TRS-80’s with 5 1/4” floppy’s and there was no “neat” factor. They just seemed like clunky little machines that were really complicated word processing calculators. I didn’t actually find an interest in computers until I saw Windows 3.11 (as I recall) with the GUI and what I felt was a system that was more user friendly, I started to really get into it, but I think that was around 1990, and I was stuck in my paycheck to paycheck grind, and the thought of career change and night school was out of the question.
I did, for a time, find myself building my own Windows machines during the windows 98 through windows XP era. Constantly making faster more updated machines, with SCSI drives and faster and faster video cards. But that was during a strange time in my life when I didn’t have a 9-5, and was in a super cheap apt in SF (rent controlled, in the range of $515 to not more that $1k for my small 1 bedroom, during the 11 years I lived there), so I had a lot of time to teach myself the hardware side of PC’s. By 2004 when I went back to work, I was over building PC’s….
BTW...makes two of us on not knowing what we're looking at....thank you for the kind words my friend.
