My first review at NewestJob went pretty well, all things considered. I did ask outright “what does ‘exceeds expectations’ work out to in percent salary?” but nothing came of it. After, as I sat out at the cafe under the overhang and watched the rain drift in, I thought about what an easier environment I’m in relative to 1997-98.
Think about it – we have Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 instead of System 7.5.3. More to the point, we have Windows XP SP3 instead of Windows NT 4. Our operating systems are a hell of a lot more robust than in years past. And they run simpler computers, too. No more mucking about connecting a Jaz drive via SCSI, not when thumb drives with more storage than a Jaz are handed out as promotional items and tossed as too small to be useful. No Zip disks. No floppy drives. Precious few CDs and DVDs, and those burned internally from within the OS rather than on an external burner with Toast or some other third-party contrivance. And of all my currently supported users put together, I can’t think of more than two with personal printers – neither of which I can recall ever supporting.
The network is so much easier to deal with, too – all TCP/IP all the time. No AppleTalk. No Netware. No NetBEUI. No more mucking about with print queues and waiting for Novell to turn out a Mac client. Getting on the Internet is no longer a function of what floor you’re on, and having a Mac no longer means pulling cable three floors through the closet to find the one Ethernet switch set up to pass AppleTalk. No Token Ring cable, no LocalTalk cable, hell, no cable at all half the time thanks to pervasive 802.11 coverage. No screwing around with modem pools. Or modems. No “dialing up” into anything. VPN connects in about 5 seconds. Email is based on IMAP, instead of some hodgepodge of gateways and proprietary LAN mail systems – or worse yet, Lotus Notes.
And most of all, Apple Remote Desktop. Any of my Mac users are just a couple clicks away, whether I’m at my desk or off in a shared cube – or at home on a couch, or on a couch at the cigar store, or in a Starbucks in Birmingham. Only the need for a physical presence when network connectivity is inoperative keeps me from running my operations full time from the third-floor balcony by Peet’s – or from the third base line at Pac Bell Park.
The point is this: after some time and distraction, I am back doing the same sort of thing I was doing six years ago, and in the intervening years, the job itself has become simpler than ever. And six years ago was miles easier than six years before that, when I first came to the business. Maybe by 2016, I really will be able to do the whole thing off an iPad while lounging on the patio at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans….