I was reading your exchange with Steve above, and I feel the sympathy of somebody who had to learn IT as I went along. I set up my first Web server in 96 with an ISDN line to the house, and had to start from scratch to pick up NT and IIS administration. My experience is kind of idiosyncratic, in that I learned a lot that I need to know about maintaining a public Web and email server, but a lot less about maintaining a corporate file server, domain security, and all the related corporate uses like roaming profiles. When I worked at eBay for a while it was a treat to work on a professionally-managed net. When roaming profiles are working right, it's like magic to log in to any PC on the corporate LAN and find yourself at home. They have a huge physical campus and everybody was always having to work on whatever PC was handy and everybody carried cell phones. "Office" was only a nominal concept.

Being an IT Guy is a mixed blessing. You get to be a hero sometimes, a member of an inner circle possessing knowledge denied to mere civilians...but you also get to experience from time to time that gutsick feeling that you've really screwed the pooch this time, and tomorrow morning 50 people are going to be out of work because maybe you've just nuked the file server and domain controller. IT happens, and always in the end you figure it out and fix it.

It's nothing new with computers, it's just the nature of dealing with technology. 30 years ago I was Chief Engineer of a San Francisco AM radio station and got to experience the screaming wrath of the owner whenever the transmitter went down and I struggled to breathe new life into a 20 year old steel hulk corroded by the ocean air in the salt marshes so conducive to good AM radio propagation. All the while knowing to the penny, thanks to the owner, how much my engineering incompetence was causing him every minute I failed to get the transmitter back on the air. I knew exactly how Scotty felt when the warp drive broke down just as the Klingons were closing in for the kill. I've been there, done that, it's the Way of the Geek, AM transmitters with actual tubes or computers or warp drives.