Mister Smarty Pants

I don't give myself enough credit. Usually. This time around I'm all about the self-congratulatory arm-breaking pat on the back.

But first, naturally, a little back story.

Six years ago or so I left the horrid world of retail for the world of IT. Well, not exactly. I just left that world not knowing where the hell I would wind up. I just knew that my life would be infinitely better not selling you the extra insurance or telling you where to find the Beano or writing a rain check for the toilet paper that was on sale and plundered in three days. And, I was pretty sure I did not ever ever ever want to drive you home after you pulled into my lot five minutes after I'd closed the office down. In the rain. On a holiday weekend.

Do I convey my derision or shall I go on? I HATED all that.

Moving along then...

I quit Enterprise Rent A Car and went to temp for a coven of witches that ran a personnel agency. The three Macbeth girls pimped me out here and there and eventually I wound up at Texaco's Corporate Planning and Economics Department on a maternity replacement gig for a departmental admin. The duties were light - type, file, book travel arrangements, stock the copier etc etc. It paid just as much as Enterprise and no one yelled at me and the phone stayed blissfully quiet.

In the meantime I decided that there might be something to the whole tech boom deal and started taking some Microsoft Networking courses at the Westchester Business Institute so I could get in on the action. What a rip off that place was. Soooo freaking expensive and the teachers were morons. Lets put it this way -- the head of the networking program had not ever taken one MS networking test or ever worked in networking at all. She had though, worked with some people that might have at one time or another clicked on Administrative Tools. Ultimately the courses were pretty useless, but they did do one thing.

They got me noticed at Texaco.

One day a guy named Ed Feinberg wandered by my desk and commented that he'd heard I liked computers and was taking some classes. He asked me if I would like to build the department's site for the Texaco global intranet. Recognizing opportunity I said yes, even though I had just about no idea how to go about it. Ed threw a copy of Publisher '98 at me and told me to have at it. Eventually I moved onto Frontpage (I know I know, the shame) and even got a Microsoft Certified Professional certification for it. (So very impressive, I know)

There I was though, now the official web guy for Texaco's CP&E. I bought some books and took some notes and met with the one of the Directors, Drew Overpeck. Drew brings up MSNBC and a few other large traffic sites and says that's what he wants. Drew could certainly dream big. I nodded and smiled like a foreigner and left his office terrified. How over my head was I?

Well, as luck would have it, hardly anyone at Texaco new anything about web design. Those who claimed they did had actually just outsourced it. The sites that were built in house were hardly professional so it seemed I could really do no wrong. They wanted me to learn.

Did I mention that this was better than washing cars in the summer in a suit?

Eventually, they brought in another guy that wound up being a super close friend, mentor and confidant, Mister Dennis Derobertis. He was brought in to help out with the CSS, whatever the hell that was. They meant ASP, but they told me CSS. Together we wound up building and managing the flagship site for Texaco's intranet.

Two and a half years or so of Shangri La at Texaco came screeching to a halt when Texaco got bought by Chevron and we were cut loose. Man did it suck leaving that place. Nine months of unemployment later, I landed a gig at Westcon, courtesy of one Ambrose Buldo, Director of E-Commerce. There I learned all about JD Edwards, E-Commerce, Biz-Talk, XML, EDI, Citrix and a host of other crap. I had a lot of leeway in my job. The people at Westcon were great and I really loved it there but I was being really underpaid. So I left the 'Con and my five minute commute for Healthology and a wheel-barrel full of money to become their QA guy, though I really did not have any QA experience.

Let me say this, QA is goddamn tough. Especially when you have no clue, and the department has no clue. So I do what I can with that and try to make up for it with my systems knowledge and sneak in some SQL Server Database stuff.

Ok, so that's the backstory.

Given the preceding, one might think I think I am quite tech savvy, that I am just the bees knees when it comes to IT. The truth is I have really struggled to define myself in that arena. I tend to look at myself as a generalist - someone with a wide range of skills but no real specialty. A utility player, or as I sometimes referred to myself, "Human Middleware". I've been working to change that but the only thing that seems to stick is database performance tuning. Along the way I've become a bit of Jr. DBA, gathering lots of knowledge but without a place to apply it.

Well, my current boss has let me run with it and I just came up with two fixes, one at the application and one at the database level that have had a huge positive impact on our application performance. We freed up at least a days worth of database processing time with fixes. The apps fly now and there is room to grow.

My solution. Me. The English Lit major, ex-helicopter pilot, ex-retail guy, ex-insurance guy, ex-real estate guy, ex-art room guy and the Brett Weston, Ansel Adams wannabe. Doing DBA shit.

Color me, for the first time in my life maybe, impressed. With me. I got a lot going on.