lowquality.net

I’m just going to throw this out there:

As I approach my career in Information Technology, I fear for my health, safety, and the health and safety of those closest to me.

I am, of course, exaggerating. I am joking, but only slightly. I have found myself to be a complete wreck. Sometimes I think I am too much of an idealist for this field. Oddly, enough if you put me in an artistic environment, that idealism melts away. The endless series of creative possibilities is too captivating for me to focus on one definitive “Right Way” to play music.

In IT, it’s different. Efficiency is key– at least it’s supposed to be. And, in IT, stupid politics seems to create stupid policies. Efficiency often gives way to spite and backbiting. It is amazing how much personal baggage gets carried over to technology. Putting control of a network, or server, or domain into the hands of someone who’s never had any real power in their life is about the same as handing a badge and a gun to the kid everyone bullies in high school. In fact, they are probably the same people. Someone with that kind of power, and with that big of a chip on their shoulder, will do whatever they want until someone stops them. They will lie, cheat and make excuses for their actions, and they will do whatever they can to keep that exhilarating feeling of power– even if it only comes from pointing and clicking a mouse. But I digress.

I question my health and safety because I feel like I am the most stressed out that I have ever been. As tough as teaching music has sometimes been, it has never been stressful. There might be some problem students, or some issues with a parent not paying me when they were supposed to. Those problems get dealt with one of two ways. Never anything too serious. I don’t know how computers have become such a source of stress for me, but I am already resenting this career change– and I haven’t even started working yet! I don’t know if this stems from going to unnamed technical school, working at unnamed technical school, working at the Governor’s School for the Arts, the lingering imminence of struggling to find a job when I graduate, studying for the CCNA cert or juggling the fifteen other things I am responsible for, but it’s wearing me down, and I believe it might even be making me a little crazy. Probably, all of these things are wearing me down and at no point does it seem like any one thing is more important than any other. I am forced to work based on deadlines, if something has a quickly approaching deadline, I do that first. Practicing bass, which has famously been my number outlet for stress and insanity, currently has no deadlines and has therefor taken the least precedence. I keep telling myself that when school is over I will be able to play more, I just don’t know if that’s the case.

Sometimes I come home and someone looks at me wrong and I just want to explode. My friends and I may joke around about something and maybe someone tries to get a rise out of me and I notice my voice getting more and more agitated and considerably louder. I watched “Falling Down” the other night and I got a little worried that I might be headed in that direction. I know that’s kind of funny, but it’s true. Earlier this term I was in class and someone asks my friend how you change the Desktop Background color on their PC– and this is a fairly advanced course– and I wanted to just get up and bash the guys head into the keyboard.

Like, repeatedly.
Like, until he goes limp.

I’m not exaggerating, it was similar to those scenes in “A Christmas Story” where Ralphie daydreams that he’s shooting burglars with his BB Gun, I really see myself bashing this guy’s head into the keyboard and just screaming at the top of my lungs like a madman (in black and white, with the ragtime silent movie piano music playing in the background). The visualization makes me laugh a little, but then it startles me because I know I am totally serious. The fact that my mother raised me right was all that stood in the way of me actually doing something totally insane, and that poor bastard had no idea.

I don’t do it. I probably won’t ever do anything like that, I’m not a physical person by nature. I’d be more likely to just yell and curse at someone, though, which, in any kind of customer service job, is the career-ending equivalent of just punching someone in the face.

Working in an IT Help Desk (my eventual fate after graduation) is to be a doomed expert in PC trivia. You learn a lot working on those kinds of jobs but, unfortunately, none of it matters. Knowing how to fix something doesn’t take away the feeling you get from an end user who blames you for the problem in the first place, whether the blame is founded on fact or not. It is a meaningless existence based on being invisible; if nothing has gone wrong, then no one knows you did such an awesome job to make things run so smoothly. If (and when) something does go wrong it will always be your fault. Always.

And people wonder why I refuse to give up on music.

Art changes peoples lives and it always matters. You don’t need to be famous or incredibly gifted to make music important. I have met lowlife scumbags in dive bars who have showed me more appreciation than they probably show their own children, just because they liked the music we played. I believe that even a bad day playing music– and I mean a BAD can still reap it’s bounty. Maybe not for the musician, but for the audience. You can have an awful night playing in an awful cover band in an awful bar and some dude in the audience will always remember that the moment you played the intro to “Don’t Stop Believin’” was the moment he knew the girl he came in with was the one he was going to marry. It might the worst gig of your life but somehow you were directly connected to someone else’s best day. It’s silly, but I am sure it happens all of the time.

I don’t think I am going to be changing anyone’s life in the IT field. Maybe my own. I just hope I can keep it together for a few more months.