Today was the first day of work. I went in and Kevin, the head of the service department, walked me through building a computer, step by step, using each of the component parts. I had some familiarity in this area, since I had been upgrading my PC since – well, since I first got a PC my freshman year in college. I knew enough to understand what he was talking about, but there were thousands of details I had never heard before. Details about the OS(s), PCI slots, IRQs, UDMA memory, the BIOS (especially the BIOS!) and lots of other acronyms I don’t care to go into any detail explaining. Suffice it to say, it was detailed, technical, and (apparently) unending. For four straight hours Kevin poured out fact after fact, minutia after minutia, before he finally said, “Well, let’s take a lunch break.”

The funny thing is, I enjoyed it. It wasn’t like “I think I’ll do this instead of playing Quake 3,” but I kept thinking, “Oh, I didn’t know that! How interesting! I’m glad I’m finally learning this!” You see, I got my first computer when I was in fifth grade – a Commodore 64. Back then, my Commodore was just like everyone else’s Commodore. Sure, maybe Mr. Morden had an “Action Replay 5” cartridge and I didn’t, but that wasn’t any big deal. I could go to “Toys R Us” and pick up any game labeled “Commodore 64/128” and know that I could play it when I got home.

As I got older, though, computers got more expensive, and you kept on having to buy more bits to add on if you wanted to play the games they carried in the store. It was too expensive for me to keep up with, especially after I got into graduate school. But for three years there in college, I worked at the college computer lab and helped people with their computer problems. I was the “answer man” everyone went to when they had a computer problem. Computers change so quickly, though – and the industry had already made a shift, and you could only stay a knowledgeable hobbyist if you had the money to keep upgrading; otherwise, you had to leave it to the professionals. After I graduated from college, I didn’t have the exposure to the latest systems, and people kept coming to me with questions I didn’t have answers to. I had Windows 98 installed on my system; I knew nothing about ME, 2000, NT, or XP. I didn’t have the money to play with them. So I slowly felt my knowledge becoming more and more outdated, and I felt a little sad, because I’d always enjoyed the field. And I’d always enjoyed being able to help people with their computer problems.

Everything awoke again when I got in there with the lid off the machine, though. I loved to hear, “This is what X is; this is how it works; these are the normal problems with it, and this is how to fix them.” Sure, after I leave this job, my knowledge will be current for only about another six months; I realize that. But for now, this is what I’m doing, and now I can be what I wanted – an industry professional!