About Rick
Ξ July 31st, 2007 | → | ∇ About The Owners |
This is old, but here ya go anyways…
Hi, I’m Rick Davis if you haven’t already figured that out. I’m 22 years old and I’ve been working in the computer industry since I was 16. I just recently decided to start a blog so that I could (hopefully) help the world with the knowledge that I’ve gained over the years, as well as helping my finances (note Google Ads). I was really inspired to start my blog by Steve Pavlina’s article How to make money from your blog. I highly recommend reading his article even if the thought of starting a blog has ever slightly crossed your mind. So, anyways, I don’t really know what I should put on my “About Me” page so I guess I’ll start with my career/life history as it relates to technology. Well, my mom bought our first computer from some dude that she knew through a friend. I was about 10 years old at the time and I think the computer was a 486, not really sure though. I started playing around with it (Windows 3.1) and AOL. I just loved it, especially when there were things that didn’t work properly and I had to fix them. As I got more & more into it, I finally found that the guy she bought it from “overcharged” us. That really pissed me off so when the time came to upgrade, I learned how to build my own. The next big thing that help me learn about computers was IRC. I had a friend that introduced me to IRC and got me playing around with different versions of Windows as well as a few flavors of Linux. When I was in high school, I got the opportunity to take the first two Cisco Networking Academy (CCNA) courses, they were awesome! I took those two classes my junior year and since me and a couple other students did so well in the class the high school offered to pay for us to take the next two classes at the local community college. I had turned sixteen the year I was taking the first two classes, and during the summer I decided to find a job using my newly attained knowledge. I had been working since I was about 13 years old, I was one of the kids sitting on the side of the road selling Sunday newspapers, so work wasn’t a new thing to me. I ended up finding an unpaid internship at a local computer service company. The best thing about this unpaid internship was that I was able to learn sooooo many new things about managing desktops, and even a couple things about managing servers. The other good thing about this unpaid internship was that whenever we had ethernet wiring jobs, he would pay me 
I ended up working there with him for only one month though…before school started back, I was offered a job with the board of education helping them prepare the schools for the new school year. This was awesome, they were even paying me above minimum wage That didn’t last long though, when the school year started, it became a co-op job, which means that they would let me out of school for 1 or 2 (out of 4) classes and I would get high school credit and a paycheck, the downside to that was they had to lower me back down to minimum wage. But hey, I was 16, and I got to leave school early, I would have actually paid for that! The board of education is where I first started using DOS batch files for more than just playing around, now I’m quite a command line guru Probably my most memorable lesson from this job was that of how RAID 5 works. They had an IBM server sitting in our workshop and I was asking the guys about RAID, they told me that the server would stay up and running if I randomly pulled a drive out. So I did. They were right. That was pretty cool. So then I put the drive back in and immediately pulled the next one out……If you’re like I was and don’t know how RAID 5 works, that’s a very bad thing to do…The server died, screen went black, wouldn’t reboot, dead. The server that I was playing around with just happened to be the file server for our group, so luckily no critical services were down, and my “punishment” for this lesson learned was to rebuild the server and restore all the data from tapes (one-by-one). And to this day, I’ve never made the same mistake. Well, I worked at the board of education for the whole school year, plus a month or two, I earned three years worth of desktop support knowledge from that job, considering all the weird problems we had to resolve, but a better opportunity came about. I found a job at a local ISP/Citrix hosting provider, making a decent amount of money, especially for only being 17 at the time. I was on the Citrix help desk, which consisted of me and another dude. This job really helped me learned the server management aspect of IT. We had about 450 or so Citrix users, Linux/Samba file server, BackupExec, Exchange, and a Linux firewall/vpn system, we even managed ATM/Frame Relay routers at client sites. I really enjoyed this job, it was very hectic, I was constantly on the phone with users fixing problems, but it was cool, I really loved working with Citrix. About 5 months after working at this company I realized that I should be making a lot more money than I was and I heard about a job opening at one of the large employers in my area. I applied for the position, had the interview, and I was bugging my interviewer about every 2 or 3 days asking if they had made a decision yet. You’ll never guess what happened next…I got FIRED! I got fired on a freakin’ Friday morning. Now my life depended on this job I had applied for (well, not really my life, but you can imagine how I felt), and the interviewer still hadn’t given me any positive updates. Well, the next Tuesday I get a call from my interviewer telling me that I got the job!!! I was so relieved, he told me my salary, I asked no questions, attempted no negotiations, I just asked how soon I could start. He told me to come down and fill out the rest of the paperwork background & credit check. So there I am filling out the paperwork and it asks me about employment history, ooohhhh shit, “Reason for leaving your previous job?” Well, I knew that they probably wouldn’t actually call my last company but I figured honesty was the best path. I told them that I was fired for having “Poor Team Skills” and “Poor Customer Service Skills”. I also explained that the “team” I was on consisted of me and an older lady that didn’t know squat about technology and had been “demoted” from a field tech to a help desk position because of her lack of knowledge in technology. And the “customer service” was ONE lady that never liked me because when I started (age 17) I didn’t have any “business casual” clothes and I was wearing blue jeans and a collared shirt, instead of khaki’s & button up shirts. Come to find out that this lady bragged to a family member (which she didn’t know was related to me) about how she got me fired. So I filled out my application around 9am or so, and about 2pm, my interviewer called me to talk about me being fired. Talk about some scary shit! So I went through the story, explained everything to him, and at the end of it all, he told me I could start on Monday I doubled my salary, and I even got a week’s vacation out of it.
***I got interrupted writing this so check back soon***
on December 20th, 2007 at 4:29 am
Great website!! Love the layout… You two should keep it updated…. I know a lot of single mommas out there…. One thing about your website is teaching how to get out of a ticket is funny. Basically you are trying to teach others how to squeeze out in paying the fines…and Rick, you should finish your story… There need to be more t-shirt designs…. So is this basically for just computer knowledge and single mom t-shirts…????
Well, take care.
gg