My Milestone Moment
Published on 1 May 2010 · Filed in Personal · 466 words (estimated 3 minutes to read)In a recent post over on her site, fellow EMC’er Polly Pearson asked this question: in your day today, did you do what you hoped to be doing when you had that “milestone moment” as a kid?
Not being a regular reader of her site (sorry Polly!), I’m not 100% sure exactly what a “milestone moment” is. I’m guessing that it’s that moment of epiphany when you realize that you’ve found what you want to do for the rest of your life. With that definition in mind, it’s hard for me to exactly pinpoint my “milestone moment”. Was it the first time I sat down at a computer, a Tandy TRS-80 in the back of a Radio Shack where my older brother was the store manager? Was it the time I wrote my first BASIC program on an Apple IIe? Perhaps my milestone moment was when I agreed to take two years of piano lessons in exchange for my own computer. (The piano skills didn’t stick with me, by the way.) I don’t know exactly what my milestone moment was.
What I do know is that I’ve had a lifelong love of learning more about computers and technology. Notice I said “a lifelong love of learning more” about computers and technology. For some people, I think the very act of working on a computer—writing a program, building a PC from hardware components, or configuring routers and switches to build a network—is enough. That’s perfectly fine. I enjoy doing all of those things, but especially in the context of learning. I can’t really say that my love of learning is just a general love of learning; I don’t really care to learn more about philosophy, for example. (I mention that because my wife, Crystal, just had to take a philosophy course in college. Whew…) And if I get to help someone else understand the information, too, that’s a bonus!
So, to answer Polly’s question: did I do today (well, yesterday, because today’s Saturday) what I thought I would do in my milestone moment? Yes, I did. Yesterday, I learned more about access control lists (ACLs) on a Cisco Nexus 7000, I learned that BIOS revision 1.01e on Cisco UCS B-series blades doesn’t properly accept the boot order from the service profile, and I learned the basics of how VRF (well, VRF-Lite actually) works and can be used in an internetwork. And, as a bonus, I was able to help someone else understand as well!
I guess the key advantage of finding yourself doing what you envisioned in your milestone moment is that you are most certainly doing what you love. And when you do what you love, it hardly feels like work at all. (Chad, if you’re reading this, it does not mean I need more work!)