My first job out of college I was hired to follow around an MSP/IT consultant and learn what he did, specifically to cut the expense of having a MCSA/network engineer coming in weekly for basic desktop support.
I met him in the server closet and asked “hey, I’m new here - do you mind if I look over your shoulder?” He turned around and smiled, “if you are here to help, then you should sit down and I’ll walk you through setting up Exchange mailboxes for these doctors.” Before he left, he walked me through a RAM upgrade and gave me his lucky red screwdriver “ you got this, just call me if you have any issues.”
Later in my career, I continue to learn lessons from this interaction; lately the lesson has been one of “don’t be awesome in a vacuum” - a little bit of encouragement to the new guy can go a long way to adding another person to your on-call rotation that you trust.
20 years later, I still have his screwdriver - and I bring it every time we have lunch every once in a while.
Life is too short to not let the people who make life enjoyable for us know so.
I met him in the server closet and asked “hey, I’m new here - do you mind if I look over your shoulder?” He turned around and smiled, “if you are here to help, then you should sit down and I’ll walk you through setting up Exchange mailboxes for these doctors.” Before he left, he walked me through a RAM upgrade and gave me his lucky red screwdriver “ you got this, just call me if you have any issues.”
Later in my career, I continue to learn lessons from this interaction; lately the lesson has been one of “don’t be awesome in a vacuum” - a little bit of encouragement to the new guy can go a long way to adding another person to your on-call rotation that you trust.
20 years later, I still have his screwdriver - and I bring it every time we have lunch every once in a while.
Life is too short to not let the people who make life enjoyable for us know so.