It's been a week, and not necessarily an easy one.
As I was finishing up my on-call duty at work, I had one last need to make another early morning run an hour or so out. That, in and of itself wasn't too bad; the hard part this week derived from a series of small blunders that ricocheted. That morning, in solving that issue, I did indeed fix the problem, but failed to pinpoint the cause. Then, on Wednesday, I was going to go home early, as I had already put in significant hours; but a fellow coworker asked if someone could help with what seemed like a simple issue with a client. I figured, "eh, why not, shouldn't take too long"... and you can predict some of what followed. Not only did it take the rest of the would-be workday, but I spent hours and hours at night rebuilding a virtual server from scratch- which was a good idea, except for the part where I nearly made a catastrophic mistake and almost "bricked" their domain/network. I REALLY lucked out and didn't. And the worst part was that my solution was not actually targeting the cause of the problem, as would learn the following day. And then, to add to the list of self-inflicted humiliation and pain, I forgot to include a client in communicating something I was doing on a hospital network, and caused their door access to get disconnected temporarily. Thankfully, I was able to get that issue solved quickly; but it was a hard week mentally, as I was feeling very angry and frustrated with myself, and each blunder that got added to the jar was just added weight in my mind and heart.
It is here that I have to put in a disclaimer, because I don't consider myself a big fan of Thomas Edison, as I think him somewhat of an 'invention thief'; but I will readily grant that one of his most famous quotes is not without great significance. This job I am working is my first job in IT. I did "IT related things a few times in previous jobs, and spent (and still spend) much of my free time building my home network and tinkering; but where I am now is my first career-related footstep in the tech industry. And it has been nothing short of an adventure and a worthy challenge. This past week was no exception to that fact, for certain. And it is Edison's quote that is part of what kept me going. The feeling of failure, however depressing, is natural, and is a part of the ever tricky process of learning. The trick is to get back onto your feet as fast as possible when you are knocked down, which is not always as easy as that sounds. Still, if you, the reader are, this week, or in any weeks previous or upcoming, feeling the brunt of the stick knock you down, especially after you felt like you gave it your all, you are doing everything quite right- you are discovering one of the many thousands of ways not to make a light bulb work. I applaud you, and hope you will move on to find the next one, and the next, until you achieve your goal.
I'll tell you, if there's another good example of that, by the way, it's coding a website by hand. It had been a moment since I brushed up on my PHP, and this past week I've been updating some elements on my site, here. Actually, I find if there's one thing trickier than remembering PHP, it's remembering SQL queries. Relational database management is cool, but a little intimidating.
In closing this week, as you are struggling through the many ways to not make a light bulb work, when you finally find the right one, take a moment to say this. See ya next week.