I love my wife and I love IT. Both are challenging as hell. For the past ten years I've lived, breathed, ate, drunk, and slept IT. I do love this job. I have traveled the country for one of the top computer manufactures as a professional services consultant. I suffered for three months right on Miami Beach. I spent time at Disneyland in Anaheim, at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut, and on Cape Cod. Of cours I love my wife and I love IT. Both are challenging as hell.For the past ten years I’ve lived, breathed, ate, drunk, and slept IT. I do love this job. I have traveled the country for one of the top computer manufactures as a professional services consultant. I suffered for three months right on Miami Beach. I spent time at Disneyland in Anaheim, at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut, and on Cape Cod. Of course, on the flip side I spent a Christmas Eve in the Denver airport. I went from Miami all summer, straight to Quebec and Boston for the winter. I’ve worked under the infamous tower at University of Texas and turned down a job in the Bahamas just so I could spend some time with my family.I’ve seen some interesting stuff. It would be hard to single out just one. I’ve seen a desktop team get nice new Windows 2000 professional machines, only to image them with Windows 95. I’ve worked for a state agency where, for Y2K, we were still upgrading 3.11 machines to 8 Megs of ram to upgrade to Windows 95.I was at the desk of my top level-one support tech when after a half hour of walking a user through several troubleshooting scenarios, I heard him say, “OK, go ahead and turn your computer on, please.” I had an administrator decide to change passwords in the middle of my live Exchange mailbox migration. A power failure struck the entirety of Nantucket Island right in the middle of an NT 4 domain rename I was handling. I’ve had a support tech tell me my brand new scsi cluster was losing its connection to the shared storage about every three days because I was using s6-foot SCSI cables instead of 3-foot SCSI cables. I’ve seen a customer pay for two complete active directory designs because they insisted they needed separate forests on the first one. I’ve watch a senior level engineer reformat the wrong computer because it was mismarked on the kvm. I’ve had a customer complain about a slow network only to find they were ftp’ing 75gigs of data between their datacenters. I even had had a large financial organization hire me to setup their backups from Phoenix to Minneapolis. It was approximately 60 gigs of data a night over a T1. Hello. It was a special day when a network admin placed “deny” permissions for domain administrators in the default domain policy. I watched in horror as a client tested his 208-volt power circuits buy turning power on and off, over and over, to the company’s brand new EMC CX500 SAN connected to their brand new 8-node exchange cluster. Yes, I wound up setting up the Exchange environment without incident.It took a special trip from Albany to Atlanta just to verify the lights were green on 32 Dell servers. It had to be me because I was Dell-certified. Plugging one to many servers into a circuit really wasn’t my fault. Quickly plugging the PDU into the next rack, bringing both circuits down, probably wasn’t my finest hour, however. My wife really believes I love my computer far more than I do her, but then, computers just seem less complicated, (although they and my wife frustrate me equally…). Bottom line: I love them both. But the computer … oh, the challenge! Data Management