When I think about how I got to the work I do today, it’s easy to start with the first computer I opened up. The story begins a little earlier, when I was still taking whatever work showed up without knowing where any of it would lead.
That’s how I ended up washing cars and working children’s parties. Then I became the person an office called when a computer stopped working. Later I spent time on the road, going from office to office to fix networks and pull cable. While I was living through them, none of those jobs looked like part of the same story. I only saw the connection much later.
When it started, I was fifteen, maybe sixteen. I don’t remember which, and I’ve stopped trying to.
At the car wash I couldn’t see a future. Nothing sophisticated about that conclusion. I looked at the job and couldn’t see what the next step would be for me. I also didn’t like how people treated each other, and that part came back at the parties.
The parties had one more thing going on. The kids were, most of the time, the easy part. The hard part was the parents. They arrived with a picture of how the party should go and how their child should react, and when the child didn’t follow the script, the frustration landed on whoever was holding the microphone. I didn’t have words for it then, but I could feel that the expectation belonged to the adult standing behind the child, and the child was the one carrying it.
Then came the computers. First inside one office, where I kept the machines running and opened whatever case had stopped turning on. Also not what I wanted. But it was close.
And close, I found out, is a category nobody teaches you to value.
From there I went to a company that served many offices at once, and the work grew with it. Networks, then the servers themselves, then installing the physical infrastructure of large offices, the rack, the cabling, the routers, whatever showed up. None of those was a dream job. Each one sat a step nearer to what I wanted, and each one only existed because I had taken the one before it.
That’s the thing I wanted to write down. A job that isn’t good gives you two things that waiting doesn’t. Either it shows you that the work suits you, and you get ground to stand on for the next one. Or it shows you that it doesn’t, and you get an answer. Both ways you leave knowing more than when you walked in.
The car wash gave me an answer. The parties gave me another one, deeper, that took me years to understand. The work with computers, servers and networks gave me ground. I couldn’t have gotten any of that from the outside.
And the answers weren’t all I left with.
At the car wash, I learned that there was an order to the work and that the result depended on following each step. It was my first contact with process, even if I didn’t use that word yet.
The parties taught me to deal directly with frustrated people and to listen before responding. That still helps when I need to understand what someone is trying to say underneath the frustration.
The work with computers, servers and networks showed me that a machine never stands alone. It depends on the network, the cabling, the equipment around it and the people who need it running. When I look at a system today, I still look for those dependencies.
None of that was the plan. I took those jobs because they were the ones available, and what they left in me only became visible from the job I have now.
I know people who have been looking for the right job for a long time. The sentence I hear most is some version of “I won’t work for less than X.” Many of them haven’t had their first hands-on experience in the field yet. I understand where it comes from. Nobody wants to sell themselves short, and there are bills, limits and jobs that take more than they give back.
At the same time, when no opportunity below the ideal salary enters the conversation, time passes and the experience that would help reach that salary never begins.
What I recognize there is a distance between the imagined script and what is actually happening. While the perfect job exists only in the imagination, it doesn’t have to face the ordinary workday. You can wait for it without risking the discovery that it wasn’t what you wanted. Some days I think that’s exactly what the waiting is protecting.
The cost of that choice isn’t the same for everyone. I’m a white man, and that is part of the story I’m telling too.
There were obstacles I didn’t have to face to enter some workplaces, be heard or get another chance. At some points, I could take a job while thinking about what it might open next. For many people, today’s paycheck has to support today’s life, and the market closes doors before experience can begin. That’s why I don’t treat my path as a recipe.
I’m not saying any job will do. Some only wear you down. A place that isolates you, or that makes you hide what you know, moves nothing.
At that point in my life, I needed to understand what each opportunity would let me learn and where it might take me. Things are different today. I’m happy and fulfilled in the work I do. I’m not writing this because I’m looking for the next place. From where I am now, I can look back and understand how those experiences brought me here.
If I had waited for the right job at fifteen, I would have waited a long time. It didn’t exist yet, and neither did I.