The government took down Napster, but there were still BitTorrents like Kazaa.  Man, that site was my best friend.  Not literally, but it was the first time I downloaded a Muse song.  This was in like 2002 or early 2003.  Download speeds were like 1.5 Mbps, and it would still take like 5 minutes to download a 4 MB .mp3.  (Nowadays, emails can be bigger than 4MB and are almost downloaded instantaneously.)  As I progressed through high school, I took a typing class.  To this day, I still can’t break 50 wpm.  Honestly, I think it’s a dexterity thing.  I’ve been cracking my knuckles since 1st grade.  Also, I’m not the best speller.  I blame the Modern English language.  I took 4 years of Spanish and 2 semesters in college, and learned more about the English language and why it’s the worst language in the world.  Ask people from other countries, and they’ll tell you about the whole order of words, verbs, and conjugation.  Spanish, French, Italian, and other Latin-based languages that aren’t English got it right.  For example, if you want to say I like red apples in Spanish, you would say Quiero las manzanas.  Which is way more efficient than, “I like red apples.” Because you conjugate Quere without knowing that it means “I” like, instead of two words, you get one.   You see.  More efficient.  Don’t even get me started on pronunciation or spelling.  Well, now that you mention it, in Spanish, you know that every letter has a distinct pronunciation.  So when you spell it and say the word, it will be the same every time.  English, on the other hand, has all these exceptions. “I before E except after C.”  Probably because we borrow French, Latin, and Spanish words from other languages all the time. These words are called loanwords.  Gosh, I hate English.

Speaking of language, IT has its own language.  And mastering this language takes years.  I think the most significant learning curve for anyone learning an IT language is that almost everything has multiple names and uses.  For example, if I asked you what you call the thing at the end of a network segment (or you ask what the heck is a network segment).  You would probably respond with four different names for that thing.  They’d all be right.  When you talk to the subject matter expert, they will probably scoff at you when you use the word that isn’t the right one.  Try talking to a Cisco guy, he would say that’s the end device because it’s at the end of the network and doesn’t forward anything to another part of the network.  To the Cisco guy, everything is a device.  But, really, it’s just a PC.  And that’s probably why non-IT folk get so upset with us, perhaps because we treat them like another device on our network.  Another “thing” we have to manage.  But that’s not how all of us IT people treat non-IT folk.  For the first 6 months I was in Help Desk and Client Support, I really tried to treat every issue and problem as if each were as important and unique as the person experiencing the problem.  That quickly wore off.  Soon, the only attention was when something wasn’t working.  I’m getting ahead of myself.  I will explain more later.

It’s fantastic when there’s a problem, and the end user will almost stop at nothing to find someone in IT to bitch at until they agree to help.  I hid once after I accidentally broke something.  I knew the risk of changing the specific part of the system during production hours, and I was a little overconfident.  Once it failed, I wanted to see how long it would take someone to find me.  Like hide and seek.  Except that I kept moving.  I didn’t stay in one place.  Well, in case you were wondering it took 10 minutes.  Deng, I gotta find better hiding spots.  If only they put that much effort into their jobs every day, I bet they wouldn’t still be working in an entry-level position after 10 years.