Superman never made any money…

I don’t talk too much about my job here. I mean, I do discuss my previous ones from time to time, mostly in the context of people I knew and experiences I had, but I find it’s not too healthy to blog about your current line of work. Which is something I learned at one of those previous jobs, albeit indirectly.
My current job is actually going well. From a stress standpoint, it’s lower than I’ve experienced in a long time. I get to do more or less what I’ve done for thirteen years, albeit with the advantage of those thirteen years of experience. Less Nuke LaLoosh, more Crash Davis, if you know what I mean. Every man reaches a point where he has to stop being Nuke and try to be Crash.
In years past, I would have gotten the big head when the subject of my performance came up. Hell, I did get the big head, literally; I went up a quarter-inch of hat size between arriving in DC and leaving seven years later. I awarded myself multiple championship belts (won the tag team titles with three different partners, retired the Hardcore Title and spent 2003 as MVP and Intercontinental Champion), and I grumbled about how Superman must fly off after saving Lois Lane for the hundredth time and say “This is bullshit, why can’t that bitch stay out of burning buildings?”
Lately, though, it’s different. In a year and a half I’m at more or less the same confidence level it took me five years to achieve in my first job – not challenging for the top spot yet, but give it time – but I’m a lot more circumspect about it. I wince at things like “Mac guru” and “computer genius,” and when I was introduced to the boss’s boss’s boss’s boss yesterday as “our Apple wizard,” I pointed out “you know, most wizards wind up burned at the stake or slaughtered by Voldemort.”
The thing is, I don’t think it’s healthy for people to think of their IT staff as some kind of mystical beings. Smart? Sure. Sharp operators? Probably. Peer staff whose business recommendations should be heeded rather than blithely ignored until something goes on fire? Absolutely. But here’s the thing: if people think you are magicians, eventually, they will expect you to do magic.
It’s not a good thing when employees are ignorant of basic computing functions and the help desk indulges them for the sake of looking like gods. When you find yourself flung back in time, the medieval peasants will worship you like a god right up to the point where you fail to resurrect the little girl who broke her neck falling down the well. Then the torches come out. There will inevitably come a day when somebody does something that makes their computer take a dirt nap, and their vital data goes with it, and they never backed up. At that point, I can take their confession, but I probably can’t raise the dead, and it’s better that they know that now so that the beheadings don’t start when that day comes.
Call it the sudden onset of senile sanity, but I don’t really want to come charging out of a burning building with the vital grant CD in one hand while the grateful masses fling money and flimsy underthings at me. I’m at a point where I’d just as soon make sure everything passes fire code inspection, then sit back at the firehouse and pet the Dalmatian while the young guys wash the truck again – because nothing’s burning down right now. Maybe the way to reconcile the need to be a stupendous badass with the need for people to keep out of your shit is to just give up on both.