I'm in a similar boat. When all of our part-time IT folks decided to find work elsewhere within 6 months of each other, i volunteered. I didn't know a thing about servers. Luckily the previous sysadmin was a control freak about documentation, so picking up the pieces and reading a lot on the internet caught me up to speed.

Hired help is a mixed bag. 6 months after I took over the job we bought a new Win2000 server to replace the NT 4 server. The company we hired to migrate us was exceptional. We kept the NT server online as the domain controller since it still seemed to be working fine and it seemed liek a good choice at the time. 3 years later I got very worried about the life expectancy of the NT server. So I tried to hire the same people to move the domain (no easy task, which I quickly decided was over my head). Unfortunatly they quit doing that type of work, so I had to go hunting for a new company. The guys I hired turned out to be clowns. They knew how to do what I needed, but failed to do adequate prep work beforehand. They also made some bad decisions in the setup, like Roaming Profiles, renaming the server, and a few other things. We were there till 2 AM trying to get all the computers up and running. The next days were crazy as i spent all my time fixing everything that got broken. One of which I couldn't fix was the deletion of my boss's e-mail for the past 2 years. That was not a fun one to try and explain.

But the job does have its advantages. Job Security is one. Nobody else wants to touch the job, and I enjoy it. When the firm layed off 1/4 of the staff 1 year after 9/11 I was privatly told that my name never even came up as a possibility. Of course this was before the little e-mail disaster. :) Sadly you don't always get to play the hero, however my hero moments far outweigh the goat moments (knock on particle board).

Steve G.