When you are curious, fun looks like work.
I love understanding how things work. Often I do things that to other people look like work but to me are fun. It is fun to be able to master new things and being bored and unchallenged is more stressful. That’s why yesterday I explored some IT technologies, and it wasn’t a burden for me to do it. I enjoyed it.
A popular way to describe someone who enjoys the detail of things is a nerd. I have been called a nerd often in my past. I’ve been called lots of things. Most of them are untrue. Many people are uncomfortable with people who are curious and knowledgeable. You don’t have to be classically smart. I am not classically smart. I am not great at math for example. However, in certain areas, I know enough to be considered a Subject Matter Expert. I am not saying this to brag, but rather that the world needs specialists at times and when you really know something, you become valuable to others.
I have enjoyed learning about Macintosh and the business systems that allow you to use technology in an effective way. In many jobs, I brought in management and automation systems to quickly get an answer that I wouldn’t have been able to do any other way. For example, in one job my boss asked me how many Adobe Creative Licenses we had. We didn’t have any management system to answer that, so I used Group Policy to push out a demo of a product that would take a software inventory. Once that agent was pushed out, I sent a query and got the answer. In only 4 hours I told him the answer to something that if I had to go around and manually do it, it just wasn’t practical. There were hundreds of employees, in different offices around the US. Some things you just need the right tools for.
Getting the right tools for a company is a fun challenge for me. I enjoy being in IT.