I Guess I'm a Sysadmin Now

I know it's been a long time since I've written. The reason for this, I'm telling myself (literally!), is that I've been working 9-hour days with a 1.5 hour commute (each way), and as a result I have about an hour a day to myself. (Being on the train, as much as I might expect and hope that it could be productive, relaxing time, doesn't count.) Weekends now feel like an indulgence, but I can at least be grateful that I'm starting to learn *some* respect for the amount of time that I do have. Funny how we can never appreciate it when we've got too much of it. Well, no need to beat myself up about it. At least now I have much more money than I need. :D I still don't think I've processed that yet--or I've processed it far too quickly to notice.

Anyway, what's new? I have been working for more than a month now, which shocks me even more than the fact that I seem to be getting pretty good at it. I understand a lot of our system now, I'm actively participating in keeping the new features of our system consistent and bug-free(ish), and I'm tackling duties above and beyond my job description. The most difficult of these has got to be the fact that I'm now the office sysadmin. I've never been very good at networking, and as a result I've never done it much (or maybe that's the cause). But who else was there to do it? *Nobody* here is a network guy, and I just happen to be the guy with the most time on his hands. And the fact is I do have a lot of theoretically knowledge of the domain, and I've always claimed to be a fast learner, so there are worse candidates. I'm not sure whether I could realistically say no--at the very least, I had to give it my best shot. And if I succeed, it'll at least look good on my resume.

As a result of this thinking, I've almost come to embrace the position. It's not without friction--I had, and still have, a *lot* to learn about networking. And there's this additional little inconvenience that I can't work on the network when anyone's there... meaning I have to stay late, meaning I have to lose sleep. But that only makes it clearer that I'm going above and beyond, so hopefully my efforts (and my successes! And my failures...) will be quite visible. Tonight, though, I think I may have succeeded at something. The new firewall box gave me a *lot* of grief, but I'm pretty sure I got it working, and what's more, this time I didn't walk away from it with my fingers crossed. After several weeks of bashing my head against this, I feel like I've passed a watershed (and a *successful* one, this time!). I really think I understood what I was doing. And if I can get it working the rest of the way, it will all have been worth it.