Rick
Ξ June 8th, 2008 | → | ∇ Uncategorized |
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, so I explained the situation to her, then my future boss called me too! 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.
Well, that was a very long interruption for those of you that were paying attention, so here’s the continuation…
Well, I stayed at this company for a week shy of 4 years, I absolutely loved my job. I made amazing progress in terms of promotions & raises. I learned so much about the computer industry. I even was lucky enough to get to go to the U.K. for 2 weeks! That was nice, the whole trip I spent $150, and I earned 25 pounds from being drunk and doing the worm in the middle of a very large crowd by the river at one of the pubs. The only bad part was I was too drunk and too white to actually do the worm, so it just kinda looked like I tripped and did a couple push-ups, lol. Well, it finally got to the point that I wasn’t learning as much as I wanted to and the salary was not enough to meet the needs (well, technically wants) that I had at the time. I always had this vision of making at least a certain salary and owning my own house, and it was going to take 4-6 years, based on previous progress within the company, to reach those goals. So, I had to make the choice of finding a new job, leaving all my friends and family behind (since there was no such thing as a job in that town that would allow me to achieve my goals), or tough it out and be bored for 4-6years+the-rest-of-my-life. And since my friends and family meant everything to me, especially considering the fact that I really suck at meeting new people, this was a tough decision for me. So, I’ve always had my resume on Monster.com, but never really messed with it, but I decided to start putting a little effort towards it. For those of you that don’t know, recruiters search the resume sites and either put search criteria in for updated within x number of days, or at the very least, sort by most recently updated first. So my totally uber haxor trick was to update my resume every day, by adding and removing a period at the end So I kept getting calls from all these jackass recruiters offering me senior level positions in areas that I couldn’t even be considered a beginner in, but I guess that comes with the territory. Anyways, I find a new job, making exactly the salary that I wanted, and it’s in Tallahassee, only 3hrs away from home. Awesome, done! So I put in my two weeks notice, and my end date was exactly one week before my 4 year anniversary, and the other funny thing, it was also exactly one week after another person quit I think that his new job pretty much doubled his salary, I guess that’s just the kind of thing that you get with small town companies. So, after about a month of staying in a hotel, traveling home for the weekends, I buy a house. Beautiful 4bd/3ba condo that was just upgraded with all new everything. Wow, ok, so now what. I met all the goals that I set for myself. I left all my friends and family. I’m making a bunch of money. Wow, it freaking sucks to be lonely don’t it! That was a really rough time for me, it’s quite a strange feeling having almost everything you ever wanted, and feeling even worse than you did before. Talk about a swift kick in the nuts, damnit man. So, yada, yada, yada, more boring depressing stuff, etc, etc, etc. After about 4 months, there’s all kinds of rumors that the new Governor of Florida does not like contractors, which I was, working for the state. Then a month after that, I hear that he wants to cut the budget for contractors, and that my department is already over budget for contractors. So you know what, this job sucked major monkey balls anyways, for the whole 6months that I was there, I did maybe 3 days worth of work at any normal pace. The whole time I was there I sat at my desk with my thumb up my ass, figuratively speaking of course. Since we could only check our personal e-mail during our lunch break, and were not allowed to do any personal web browsing, I sat there one week and read the entire VB.NET Programming reference, and I started on the C# one, but I got distracted by playing games on my cell phone because that was a little to boring even for my taste. So, needless to say, I will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever work for any government agency again, maybe CIA/NSA, something like that, but only if they ask for me So, that was that, time for a new job, A.S.A.P. I start scrambling to find a new job, I even consider going back to my previous company. Well, after doing my monster.com trick, I found a new job, making more money, but down in Tampa. 7hrs away from home. The kicker is there is this thing called FiOS where they bring fiber optic cables to your house, and hook you up with T.V., Phone, and Internet, and I would be working with the TV portion of FiOS. One of the big things that I like when I worked at my previous company was that I could actually talk to people about my work, say hey, have you been to this site, yea, well, I run the servers that are running that site. But working with FiOS TV, wow, that’s some really cool shit! That’s way better that saying hey have you been to this website, this you can say, hey look at my TV, I help make that work! So, after some serious deliberation, here I am in Tampa. It’s kinda weird about the whole friends back home thing. Before I left home, I knew that most of my friends I would never talk to again. And for the most part, I was right. Of the few really close friends that I had, none are still as close, not even the one that I “knew” that would never happen with, which is quite surprising to me, but that was actually my choice. I hate being lied to, and I caught him in a lie, and he still denied it, so that was it. You want to know the worst part about losing him as a friend? How easy it was. It’s weird how after living the status quo for so long, you can be blinded so badly to where you don’t even realize what a friend is. Oh well, shit happens. I still have that one good friend that promised to help me keep this site updated and then just slacked off like a lazy ass bastard. So, I’ve been in Tampa now for about 9 months now, I absolutely love it. The job is awesome, it’s challenging, exciting, and I get to learn a lot. My boss is awesome, my coworkers are awesome, I couldn’t think of any other job that would be better than this, even something that payed twice as much. Except maybe Google Well, I kind of worked myself into a bind, the real estate market in Tallahassee, and pretty much everywhere, really sucks right now, so I haven’t been able to sell my condo up there, which forced me to rent a room from an old lady down here. But hey, she’s pretty cool, she’s just as sarcastic as I am, so we get along very well. And since I’m renting out the condo up there, I’m not losing quite as much money as I really should be. Well, anyways, back to the whole whatever it was I was trying to finish saying about myself. Well, I recently got on this kick of doing things that I wanted to do, pretty much when I wanted to do it. One of the other goals of my life was to own another dirt bike. So, I traded in my car for a truck, then went and bought a dirt bike the next day And let me tell you what…getting your ass kicked by a dirt bike will definitely help you forget about being lonely. It’s nice to just say forget it and go do exactly what you want to do. That’s kind of been my modus operandi recently, if I want to do something, I don’t hesitate, I don’t sit and ponder all the possible benefits and consequences involved with it, I just freaking do it. It’s a very rewarding way to live. Much different than the way that I have been doing things, it’s nice. Now the messed up part…after about 2 riding sessions, I totaled that nice truck that I just bought 3 weeks earlier. That truck was awesome, it was “THE” truck that I had always wanted, everything the way I wanted it, to the T. The only thing was it was white, which I didn’t really like at first, but by the third week, it was alright. So, thanksgiving morning, it was totaled…damn telephone pole just wouldn’t get out of my way. Word of advice, if you ever find yourself driving in a ditch, try to avoid the telephone poles, they’re mean little bastards. So, umm, yea, that really sucked. So, anyways, female wise, it’s been pretty slow here for me. I have somewhat high standards, and that in combination with that I’m not quite in shape, and I’m incredibly shy, make things very difficult. But, there was this one girl, so totally awesome, a perfect match for me in so many ways, wow, didn’t know that was possible. Damn, so close, if only she wasn’t freaking crazy! Oh well, it was so nice the short while that it lasted. The funny thing is that it was actually pretty easy to get over, kinda like losing most of my friends, I hope I’m not growing numb. I doubt it, but hey, that might be nice too. So, I was sitting here tonight thinking about the potential love lost, and all of a sudden, I realized that if I could find someone that was right on so many levels for me, then that means that there is actually a good hope in finding the one that is right on every level. I never thought that I would be able to find one that was right on as many levels as she was, and I was wrong, so in a weird kinda way, I’m somewhat ***something*** (I don’t know what the right word is, but it’s something like inspired, or revitalized, or something like that). And it’s funny how I was so mad at her, since it was her fault for us not talking to each other anymore, and now, I’m actually thankful that she did what she did, since now I know two things…one…she definitely wasn’t the right one for me, and two…there might actually be someone out there that “meets my criteria”. Well, so what now? My plans…hmmm….don’t really know…first and foremost I’ll be doing only the things that I want to do. It was funny one of the last times that I visited home, I was out with my old buddies and they all wanted to go to a club, and I hate clubs, so when they expected me to get peer pressured into going to the club with them, and I said no, and stayed at the pool haul doing what I love to do, it was a very good feeling. That experience and the whole dirt biking thing has left me with a, still cautious, yet stronger resolve to simply do the things that I want to do, and not do the things that I don’t want to do. Second…I have some big flaws that I need to work on…first being my shyness…second being getting in shape. I really don’t know how the hell I’m going to fix the first one, but the dirt biking is definitely helping with the second
And believe it or not, I’m done writing for the moment, adios, putas
