Love and loss

Is it really better to have loved and lost or is ingorance truly bliss...

Just what about ripping your heart out and stomping on it in the middle of a mosh pit is beneficial?

Oh!  What lessons we've learned!  What wisdom we can partake!

Bull...

I vote ignorance...

Here's why.  If you're ignorant you don't know any better and you go on blissfully unaware of the horrors of the world around you.  Your safe, little insular life prevents you from considering anything that could challenge those rose colored glasses.

All is grand.

There's something to be said for wisdom but to get it takes courage and a willingness to discover a world far scarier than our warm little cocoon could process.

You're happier if you're a coward in this instance.

Here's the difference between love lost and ignorance of it.

When love is lost what you're really losing is hope.  Along with it goes faith, civility and all those other niceties that come from living in modern society.

You mourn what could have been.  What dreams may have been realized with that special someone.

When love is never known all you lose is knowledge of the above.  

That's not such an awful thing.  The human condition pre-disposes us to seek out companionship but what if you do it wrong?

Again and again...

The only thing lost from having never loved is knowledge of the pain from screwing it up.

That "Courage" thing is best left to the Red Shirts on Star Trek.  They never seem to have much of a career path aside from keeping Kirk from an untimely end. Kind of like a one-sided relationship.

Over and Over again...

Wisdom in matters of love is often just an admission that you keep screwing up.  Worse, you remember it...ALL OF IT.  Every second of torturous uncertainty and pain.

I'll never understand why people like to place so much value in pain.  Pain is an annoyance.  If I get a blister on my finger it makes it hard for me to type a blog post.  Aside from fewer boring posts for the hapless reader who stumbles upon them, what possible value do I gain from the wisdom of blisters?

The worst case scenario comes when you mix ignorance and love.  That frequently leads to a thing called "unrequited love."  Which is just another word for "dumbass."  The actual meaning is one that loves without getting love in return.  That anyone would tolerate such a thing to me makes them excellent candidates for the anti-waterboarding detail.  If you can put up with that no amount of dripping will break you.

Perhaps that should be a new recruitment criteria for the military!

Anyone that would willingly inflict that much pain on themselves must enjoy it.

I've enjoyed it, if you can call it that.  No wait, I didn't enjoy it at all...
 I didn't intend to but either my own rose colored glasses got involved or I was led down a path.  Admittedly of my own creation.

That's another lesson.  If you're going to screw up, don't blame anyone but yourself.  You saw the signs and blissfully ignored them. 

Idiot..

I think I'm done with paths, glasses and walking for now.  It gets my shoes dirty and doesn't lead anywhere beneficial in which case the real loss is time.  Something we have so very little of.

I'm not anti-romance, just anti-stupid.

Aint love grand...

Don't go to work

I've always believed that the work you do should matter to you.  If you're just plodding along day after day counting the hours till the weekend then frankly you're just wasting your and everyone else's time.

I know it's not always possible to "follow your bliss" but life's too short to only enjoy the weekends.

After over 20 years in the field I've come to the realization that the closest I can come to cubicle dwelling bliss is to either run the IT department or just blithely take my marching orders at its lowest rung.

Anything else just has me spinning my wheels.

So while my credentials include jobs in system administration, support and  project management not to mention creating a successful IT consulting business, my dreams of sitting in the big chair are about as likely as a winning lottery ticket.

So as I scan the job boards and the occasional craigslist posting I keep a vigilant eye open for positions that match the other end of my proposed  bliss...

I had thought I found one the other day.  It was a support job that was described as being part roving admin and part helpdesk.  The nice part was that if I had to go  anywhere the company provided the transportation. 

It seemed perfect.  The pay rate was a little low but if I wasn't shouldering the cost of transportation that was a leg up on anything else I'd seen. 

My application had apparently impressed the hiring manager enough for him to schedule a short phone screen.

In the course of the subsequent conversation the manager told me that the job would involve around 80 hours per week at all hours.  The prospective employee was expected to be available round the clock 24/7/365 and work from the office, home and wherever else he/she was required.

Believe it or not I was still considering the position even after I did the math and figured out that I would be making $9.61 per hour before taxes.

But that wasn't what really turned me off to the job. 

It was the realization during the Q & A part of the interview that this company, like many others, was built on making bad decisions.

Decisions like:

• Attempted "Cleaning" of rootkit, malware and virus infections off of PC's instead of reloading from a backup image. 
• Not providing adequate training to your technicians
• Not staying current with technical advances
• Supporting 20 year old servers with no hope of replacement parts
• Installing software that was no longer being supported by the manufacturer
• Not informing the client as to best practices or upgrade options
• Accepting liability for an SLA at a client where meeting that SLA is impossible due to the previously mentioned reasons.

It all amounts to billing for work that isn't really being done and I have a problem with that. 

IT is an uphill battle and if you're not moving forward it won't be long till you're moving the other direction.  It seems that most of the major players disagree, however, as they've built their IT support businesses off of doing what amounts to little more than "busywork"

It's one of the reasons I don't make the money in consulting that many think I should be.  I like to fix the problem once and move on from there.  I'm not one to keep beating a dead horse.  

The client is the boss but I'm being paid to know things they don't.  That's a level of trust that I refuse to betray.  That means that sometimes you have to have an uncomfortable conversation but I'd rather lose a client that wants me to do shoddy work than continue on and sacrifice my own integrity.

We're getting back to my original assertion that your work life should be meaningful and anything less is just a waste of time.

Making money off not doing the job your clients are trusting you to do is the ultimate expression of that and I can't stomach it.

www.sentrytechnical.com