Last Updated on July 17, 2023

It started when I was twelve years old. My parents bought me my first computer. I became instantly hooked. I spent hours surfing the web, playing video games, and making websites.

The people around me noticed that I was good at computers. By age sixteen, I was making house calls and doing general troubleshooting.
It landed me a job in a pawn shop where I was fixing computers and making eBay auctions.

When I turned twenty, I went to a career institute for Information technology, otherwise known as I.T. It took a year to complete. My teachers’ little knowledge about their teaching subjects surprised me, but this was 2007, and computers were still new. I graduated, did my internship, got A+ certified, and was on my way to my first job through a temp agency. I remember applying to about 100 jobs before I got a call for an interview.

My first temporary job, otherwise known as a contractor project, as my recruiter put it. I was with a Fortune 500 company. I was excited; however, it turned out to be me and another contractor from the temp agency sitting in a conference room for three weeks watching computers install Windows 7.

I spent the first five years of my career. Getting calls from temp agencies for various projects. The longer my career progressed, the more calls came. The projects commonly included installing windows and hooking up computers at people’s desks. It was an easy job, and I was building my resume, creating contacts and references.

Then after about five years, I would do installation projects with troubleshooting which commonly included software installation issues and peripherals. Then on a 6-month project, the manager approached me and said if you do a good job, I will give you a permanent job then it hit me.
I was not enjoying this I.T. desktop support job and did not want to do it for the rest of my life. Around that time, I planned to go into business for myself. So I decided to continue these projects and stop when the time was right.

Being a “temp” or a contractor for these Fortune 500, even 50 companies, means you are a second-tier citizen. You get all the crappy work and little benefits as payment. Temps can’t go to the human resources department and, as a result, get mistreated and even insulted by full-time employees.

After about nine years, I got a semi-full-time desktop support technician position. I say semi because I was working for a different company as a full-time employee at a client’s location, meaning the client could ask us not to return to the company the next day for any reason. It would force our company to reassign us.

I was not too fond of it. From the lack of documentation of troubleshooting steps to unresolvable problems and customers’ frustration, we, the technicians, were the problem. Lack of support from management and the locks on the software prevented us from doing simple things like running updates.

I tried a different company, but it was the same scenario. I realized then I was in a job I hated. I never met anybody who enjoyed troubleshooting computers in a corporate environment. Sure, they said they liked it, but if you talked to them, They said they were doing it for the money.

Right around the fourteen-year mark, I started having some health issues. I decided to leave the information technology field and pursue other endeavors like this blog :-). So my advice is to avoid getting into I.T. Sure, I could have tried getting a better position and made more money, but that meant even more dead ends and computer problems with no solutions. Which management did not understand.

I made around $60,000 thousand. When I got out in 2020, it was the most miserable I have ever been that year. Looking back, I shouldn’t have stayed in it for that long, and it was nothing that I thought would have been in school—too many headaches for too little pay.