{"id":2185,"date":"2015-03-17T08:04:20","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T16:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2185"},"modified":"2015-03-17T08:04:33","modified_gmt":"2015-03-17T16:04:33","slug":"the-seven-year-itch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2185","title":{"rendered":"The Seven Year Itch"},"content":{"rendered":"

We didn\u2019t celebrate St Patrick\u2019s Day that much in the old country. \u00a0Oh sure, I got free-rolled into the 4P\u2019s once on the big day, and I did it just to be able to say I had, but we were Irish enough in our regular weekends that we dismissed March 17 as amateur day, a ridiculous confluence of American marketing and the perpetual need of twenty-somethings to seek an opportunity to drink like mad. St Paddy\u2019s was for people who thought green beer was cool, Killian\u2019s Irish Red was authentic and 26, 6 and 32 were something from Lost<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And then I moved west, and suddenly, it felt important to have a Guinness on the train into work on the 17th and blast the Pogues \u201cStreams of Whiskey\u201d at full volume. Now it\u2019s a day to holler back at the old gang, renew the old shtick. And it got me thinking about something else, too, as we bustle around trying to straighten up the house for company coming.<\/p>\n

In the late 1990s, the National Geographic Society did a retention survey, attempting to ascertain why people dropped their memberships (i.e. stopped subscribing to the big magazine). And the number-one reason, the overwhelming leader in the clubhouse, was that they couldn\u2019t find a place to store them. People just don\u2019t throw away National Geographic. There was a story, possibly apocryphal, of a sheriff who saw that a well-loved neighborhood family was moving away and throwing out their National Geographics. \u00a0He found this odd, sniffed around a little, and discovered that the family were actually Soviet spies. Sounds way too good to be true, but it makes the point.<\/p>\n

Sometime this autumn, around Christmas, I will have been at my current job longer than I was at NGS.<\/p>\n

It stings for a couple of reasons. I\u2019ve had four major employers in my adult life, none of whom I ever had to explain what they did. But none of them – not NASA, not Apple, and certainly not where I am now – triggered the instant \u201cHOLY SHIT THAT IS SO COOL\u201d that the big yellow rectangle did. And I miss that. \u00a0I miss it more than I\u2019m willing to admit to myself, for a couple of reasons. \u00a0For one, Silicon Valley isn\u2019t as cool as it used to be. \u00a0The influx of tech dickery, the invasion of San Francisco and the growing sense that this is still where your future comes from, only now it\u2019s corporate-technocracy and dystopian – that\u2019s unpleasant enough.<\/p>\n

But for another thing, I haven\u2019t grown since I took this job. \u00a0I\u2019m not sorry I took it – I needed out of government subcontracting in the worst possible way – but I honestly didn\u2019t think it would prove as stagnant as it did. In my seven years at NGS, I went from a kid off the street with a strong aficionado\u2019s sense of the Mac to a fully certified technical consultant, ably handling Mac and PC issues alike, the guy they called on for times when you needed a satellite phone to call into an ISP to download mail but couldn\u2019t test it until it reached Gabon or when you needed to shorten the pilot program for OS X deployment from 6 months to 3 days. \u00a0Eleven years on, it\u2019s\u2026the same thing, only slightly less so. \u00a0We don\u2019t actually test or pilot things, we just do them and clean up the mess. \u00a0Other IT people break shit and I fix it\u2026just like 2003. \u00a0I build out the Mac deployment solution using NetBoot\u2026just like in 2004. I get called in for VIP Mac issues for people I don\u2019t support\u2026just like 1999. I got an Apple class and certification\u2026just like 2002. And I got old. \u00a0I was 32 when I left DC, and if you don\u2019t think there\u2019s a huge difference in this valley between a 32 year old workstation tech and a 43 year old workstation tech, you\u2019re not paying attention.<\/p>\n

The toughest thing you will ever do in this life is to stop looking back in all the wrong ways. I know that. \u00a0I know that being here doesn\u2019t diminish what I accomplished in my previous jobs. I know my life isn\u2019t over. I know I probably have twenty years til retirement and a lot of things to do in the meantime. But I\u2019d really love to feel like I\u2019m not going backward, and that\u2019s what this job makes me feel like. And if somebody dropped a quarter-million dollars cash on me to allow me time to start over doing something else, I\u2019d take it in a second.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We didn\u2019t celebrate St Patrick\u2019s Day that much in the old country. \u00a0Oh sure, I got free-rolled into the 4P\u2019s once on the big day, and I did it just to be able to say I had, but we were Irish enough in our regular weekends that we dismissed March 17 as amateur day, a … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Seven Year Itch”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2185"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2186,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2185\/revisions\/2186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}