I was hired to do simple stuff like spit out financial reports, review account balances, deal with tax audits, supervise a small accounting staff, and all kinds of other fun financial stuff.

How did I get roped into this MIS role too???

Actually its not to bad... When I first got here we had no server and only very slow ISDN connections to the internet.

Convincing the owners that we needed a server and T-1's for better security and centralization of resourses was difficult...every thing was peer-peer, and file sharing was completely unmanageable...

Once I got approval for the Server and T-1 configuration, I had no idea how difficult it would be to get it all up and running...We are a small business and can't afford an MIS staff (Maybe someday!). I've had the current network configuration up now for about 12 months and am finally starting to feel like I have a handle on the situation.

Its been a good learning experience I guess! The scary thing is most of the technical help I've hired has seemed to have no clue on what in hind-site should have been fairly straight forward problems. I don't know why my configuration was so difficult. It is really a simple hub and spokes.

If I knew then, what I know now, how things could have been made so much simpler! I think if I ever change jobs again, that I'll go to a huge conglomerate where I can leave the networking to somebody else and just return to my lowly "power user" status.