In this super-edgy series, we interrogate IT Pros in order to find out what makes them tick. In this episode, we dug deep into the life of Jrx1216, aka “Josh.”
Here is what he had to say:
What brought you to Spiceworks?
When I first started my new career, I had a lot of downtime and spend most of it trying to learn and improve myself, and continuously found myself reading posts here in the community. Eventually I started stumbling across things I thought I might be able to help with, so I signed up to dive into the community a bit more.
What keeps you here?
The community! This is the only community I’ve ever found that makes me feel “at home.” I love reading Snap! and Spark! as well as just generally interacting with the others here. Most of the community is both wise and respectful, for the most part, which are two traits that I’ve not seen as much of in any other online community I’ve experienced. There’s a fair share of sarcasm and smart alecs, but even those people are usually here in an attempt to help others.
What is your favorite aspect of the site?
Again, it’s the community! I also enjoy trying to keep up my daily quiz streaks and such, but I’d still keep coming back for the community if that went away tomorrow. If I had to pick a specific section, it would probably be the “ I made the next pepper level ” thread.
When I first joined and filled out my profile for the bonus 100 points , and leveled up, I posted in that thread thinking “Over 200 pages? There is no way anyone will ever see this, but hey, 11 free points I guess…” and then the next day Yankeelady2015 replied to congratulate me.
Maybe I made it out to be a bigger thing than it was, but that floored me. Ever since that, I’ve been poking my head in there to keep up that trend. No one goes uncongratulated on my watch. That’s a big part of what started my appreciation for this community, and thinking that someone else might appreciate that as much as I did keeps me going back to that thread.
What got you into the IT field?
Tearing things apart. From the time I could hold a screwdriver myself I’ve been taking things apart, and usually failing to put them back together, haha! Eventually I started learning how some of those things worked and could manage to get them back to at least a working condition, if not back to the condition they were when I took them apart, haha. That naturally lead into breaking and fixing computers for the family, and eventually turned into a passion for technology and for learning how things work.
What has been your favorite part of the industry?
Playing with all the cool toys! It still amazes me that CPU manufacturers have managed to cram billions of transistors into a chip that’s not much bigger than my thumbprint and then turn them on and off in the multi-GHz for years without much chance of failure. SuperRay72 posted something here a while back that I’ve kept on a post-it “We’re not magicians and this isn’t magic” but it absolutely is at times! To the average human, we ARE magicians. At least some of the time, haha.
What do you do now?
I believe my official title is helpdesk technician… for now, haha. I’ve started talking to my manager about a promotion to change that to some kind of systems engineering, an official promotion would be nice, haha.
How did you learn your job?
This is a difficult question… There’s a lot of different aspects to my job, most of which comes naturally when you’ve been tinkering with computers for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years. A lot of specifics to my current position came with writing documentation. Remember that downtime I mentioned having when I first started? I spend a good deal of that time working on a OneNote notebook to help others that I knew would also be starting a similar position shortly after me. I managed to start just as most of the previous helpdesk staff were leaving and they didn’t have a whole lot of training in place for the new helpdesk crew. I also happen to work remotely, so there was a lot of self-learning and question asking. Writing everything down helped me not only remember it, but also continues to help new helpdesk techs today. The OneNote I started is now the official place for our documentation for most of the department.
What are your favorite technologies to work with?
Hardware is what I find the most interesting, but, working remotely, the only hardware I really get to play with is in my home lab and the gaming PCs I build… I’ve been really enjoying working with PowerShell lately, though, and have been working to automate a lot of our more complicated processes that end up with mistakes due to complexity or the sheer number of steps.
What sort of challenges do you face in maintaining your infrastructure?
[Note from transcriptionist: The “truth” drugs seem to have been a little too strong at this point. I couldn’t find anything coherent for this particular answer. Apologies.]
What new technologies are you implementing or looking at? Why?
It’s not exactly new but I’ve been looking at implementing PowerShell’s Desired State Configuration into some of our deployment systems. We’re currently doing a lot of stuff manually that we have no reason to other than “We’ve always done it that way, why wouldn’t we?” and automating some of those tasks could really help us out with the extra time we’ll need for some larger projects we have coming up.
What recent projects have you wrapped up? What did you learn from them?
The most recent project I’ve wrapped up, that I’m proud of, is a script that automates the account and mailbox creation for one of our subsidiaries. In doing that I learned to not be afraid to use the work of others. There’s a huge section of the script that our Sr. Systems Engineer took from a previous script he did and tacked it on to mine, and it massively improved how quickly you can use the script, as well as allowing us to have other scripts call it much more easily, which may help automate it even further in the future. It required some slight modification to work, of course, but if I had just copied his work from the beginning, I would have saved myself a lot of time and effort… although I also wouldn’t have learned as much about some other things that I spent time researching, so I don’t regret it in this case.
Do you have any other story from the IT trenches that you would like to share?
[redacted]
What advice do you have for people entering the IT field today?
Document everything you can. It will help you when something breaks or needs to be modified. Even if you just jot a few notes in a notebook each day, it’ll help you out later, and for me personally, it improved my self-confidence/self-worth to be able to look back at my accomplishments.
Do you have any other advice or a message for your fellow SpiceHeads?
Celebrate your victories and accomplishments, even the little ones sometimes. It’s really easy to get imposter syndrome, and in my experience, celebrating your accomplishments helps with keeping it at bay. At least, it did for me.
What color is your toothbrush?
I think it’s green? Maybe blue? I’m not really 100% sure… I’m gonna blame colorblindness on this one, haha, but it may just be that I haven’t used this one enough to remember yet. What I can tell you is that I’m like 85% sure the turtle toothbrush holder he lives in/on is green, haha.
Creamy or crunchy peanut butter?
Creamy all the way. I don’t like the way crunchy PB, or even just peanuts in general, feel gritty in my mouth. It’s like my teeth aren’t the right shape to crush them well enough… or maybe I just don’t understand how to eat nuts?
What is your favorite color?
My go-to answer for this is purple, I have purple keycaps on my keyboard, purple post-its all over my desk and monitor bezels, purple wallpapers on 2/3 of my monitors, a white and purple gaming PC at home, and even purple shoelaces… but at some point the purple really became more of a statement, or small rebellion I guess, than my actual favorite color. I remember a supervisor at my previous job telling me there’s no way I would actually put purple laces on my shoes and wear them in public… so I did it to prove him wrong and just kept them.
Colors are hard though… I’ve never been officially diagnosed with colorblindness, but my high-school nurse said it was definitely an issue I had. I think I see most colors ok, but there are certain shades that are really hard for me to tell apart sometimes, and sometimes the blue on my state’s license plates looks red to me.
What are your favorite hobbies?
I have too many hobbies, haha. I recently gave my 3D printer away because I realized it’d been over a year since I’d fired it up because I’ve had so many other things I’d gotten interested in. Most of my hobbies involve making things, usually out of wood. The girlfriend won’t let me get metalworking tools, so wood’s the best I can do for now. Beyond making things, I play a lot of video games, although I frequently find myself falling back into Minecraft, which is sorta like making things, sooo…
Why did the chicken cross the road?
How else would he find out what’s on the other side? What if they’ve got anteaters on the other side of the road? Anteaters are cool! Seriously, I thought they were one of the stupidest animals to like, until I saw one in person… now I have an anteater plush on my desk… wait, what was the question?
What is your favorite movie or book?
I don’t really watch movies, and I don’t read as many books as I probably should anymore, but I’m currently working my way through John Bargh’s “Before You Know It” and enjoying what I’ve learned from it so far.
What is your favorite fictional universe, and why?
There are so many good ones to pick from… most of then I’d never want to actually live in, haha. My favorite is probably either the DnD world I created, because I spent way too long creating it for the single play session we did, or the one I’ve spent the most time playing in, because it’s so fleshed out at this point that when we play it’s like I’m actually there sometimes.
Who asks you for IT assistance the most outside of work?
My grandparents… Constantly. They know enough to browse Ebay, Craigslist, and such, but not enough to be able to tell when someone is trying to scam them, so I’m always helping them with the checkout process. They’re now afraid to checkout on any site if I’m not there to click the button for them, which is a good thing I guess.
We got them each a nice tablet last year and they’ve started asking me questions about that now too… luckily, my sister uses android much more than I do (I’d be fairly happy with a flip phone at this point, haha). She’s become their go-to for support on that front.
If you were a superhero (or supervillain) what would your super power be?
Flying would definitely be one of the more fun superpowers. It’s probably not that handy on its own (unless I’m just saving kittens from trees and phone polls all day), but traffic would be much less of a problem! Let’s go with flying.
Do you listen to music while you work or do you prefer silence? If you do, then what Genre keeps you going?
Even if I’m not listening to music, there’s always music playing in my head. I listen to basically every Genre, save modern country, and the stereotypical negative rap. I didn’t listen to rap at all until recently, when I found some rappers that did purely positive music, and I’ve been really enjoying some of it. I’ve been really enjoying Judah & the Lion lately as well. Their banjo playing gives me nostalgia for when my maternal grandparents used to sing to me when I was a child. They were in a bluegrass band, Grandma played banjo and Pappy played the guitar.
What was your first computer equipment?
I wish I would have kept it… I don’t know exactly what model it was, but it was an IBM machine, it had PS2 for the mouse, but an AT connector for the keyboard, and it had both a 5¼ and a 3½ floppy if any of that helps… It was upgraded to a 4GB hdd when I first got it and a fresh install of Windows 95. I remember my uncle had made me a few disks that had a bunch of DOS games on them that I used to play on it… I was still using that well into the early 2000s but sadly took it in for scrap before I really started getting into IT.
What kind of personal computer equipment do you use now?
I have a decently sized collection of old ThinkPads that are all running some flavor of Linux with the Mate desktop environment. I keep them scattered around the house for various purposes… My main gaming rig I just built is a Ryzen 2700 and RTX 2070 build in black and white, and my second desktop, which I’ve just started the process of retiring is an aging 3rd gen intel i5 and a GTX 1070 that I’ve spent way too much money and time on over the years… I’ve got each cable individually sleeved and every part is either painted or vinyl wrapped to match the white/purple theme.
My homelab consists of an assortment of IBM x3550 M3s and M4s, as well as an R710, an R610, a 24 Gigabit port Mikrotik switch with a couple 10GB/s SFP uplinks and some Ubiquity gear.
What is your favorite food or meal?
I’m a pretty picky eater, but BBQ Pizza is always a good one. I used to work at a Pizza Hut and I’d make pizzas with BBQ sauce instead of regular sauce and use the breaded chicken wings that were too small to serve to customers as toppings. Served with a side of hot sauce for dipping the crust in.
What spicy User Groups do you participate in?
I don’t participate as much as I should, but I’ve joined the HomeLabs , Jokes Galore , Tabletop RPG , and YouTube groups
If IT was Thanos-snapped and you had to choose a different career path, what would it be?
I have a worksheet from my pre-school class where I said I wanted to be a zookeeper, haha, that seems like a fun job. Honestly, though, I really liked my pizza delivery days, and I’d probably go back to that if I needed a job ASAP. Long term, maybe managing a pizza place myself? I enjoyed learning the ins and outs and every back road in the towns where I’d delver, and I really liked going to places I’d never been and trying to plan out routes on roads I’d never taken and exploring others on my way back to learn the area before my next delivery. Maybe something like UPS or FedEx would give me that feeling on a larger scale? Some sort of job where I’m exploring new places, I guess, haha!
Do you prefer coffee or tea or something else?
Tea. I’ve never really understood coffee, it smells delicious, but it never tastes good. I typically drink plain black tea when given the opportunity, though.
What is a guilty pleasure that no one would suspect about you?
I dunno if I’d call it a guilty pleasure, but I’ve seen the entirety of the first 2 seasons of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It’s pretty good, actually.
And there you have it. The fairly-complete transcript of the interrogation. Feel free to ask additional questions in the comments below.
Tune in next time as we delve into the psyche of another subject… or, if you think you can stand the heat, you can volunteer for your own interrogation. Write to news@spiceworks.com with the subject line “IT Interrogation” (or alternatively “Willing Victim”). Be sure to include your username so we know exactly who to kidnap.
Like this? Read the transcripts of other interrogations HERE !
@juliekean
