[Male30Dan]

I am a Network Administrator for a growing company in Temple. I do it because I have always been really good at this type of stuff and because I couldn't imagine going to school for 8+ years to do the next thing that was on my list of career jobs - being a Vet, (I LOVE animals). I get my work and it comes natural so why not make a good living doing something easy. To be specific, I manage roughly 12 servers, 200 PCs, 120 VPNs, a Help Desk for ALL IT calls and multiple technicians. I manage IIS, DNS, SQL, AD, Exchange, and NUMEROUS proprietary applications for our industry. Only about a year ago I got some serious help in and got to stop driving 3-4k miles per month hitting our outlying locations. I was doing every single printer call, scanner call, cable call, etc... At least I no longer have to run cables and do the incredibly boring windshield time - though I still put in about 1k per month. I am in charge of everything outside of some software applications and I put in, on average, 60 hours per week.

Do I love it? Sometimes. It is really rewarding at times and very very repetitive at others. Overall, I enjoy my career but I sometimes find myself really bored and lacking inspiration in life. I wish I could be doing something creative like RMA or even be brave enough like Finley to get out there on my own and be my own boss. In the end I am afraid of failure and I can't put my family in a position where, if I fail we lose everything. So, I continue to tread water in the office environment and I imagine I always will.

Sometimes I wish it didn't come so easy. Sometimes I wish I would just get fired and have no jobs open so I would have to dedicate my passions elsewhere. But then I think about my daughter and wife and son on the way. I remember how hard I had it growing up and how poor my family was. Those are the thoughts that make me read the extra MCSE book and take the meaningless tests to prove I am worthy to work in IT and should be paid top dollar. Life has a huge chunk of politics in it and I ride the same wave that the majority of us do. Props to some in here that choose not to tread water but rather get on a surfboard for that wave. It takes guts!