based on a true story

The main conference room of the Burlington Marriott is filled with middle aged men with varying shades of paunch. There's salt'n'pepper hair amongst most of them, and baldness prevalent in the rest. There are some suits in the crowd, some jeans and t-shirts, and lots of disheveledness. It's all IT sysadmins and project managers, gathered here for a seminar on disaster recovery, and their presence is inspiring all levels of discomfort. I've been here for only ten minutes, and already I feel like leaving.

I've known for a while that, although I am a good sysadmin, I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. It's not the work -- it's everything a young knowledge worker could ask for -- fun, ever-varying, ample opportunities to argue with your betters, etc. It's not the work, it's the success, or at least the consequences of success.

You start off as an architect, building elegant systems and fine tuned networks, but your later success is based on keeping it all running. You worry about preventing a million potential tiny disasters that you may or may not control. Improvisation gives way to best practices. You take the safe option and buy beige. You get anal about your inventory of spare hard drives. You fixate on the robustness of your firewall and dream of deadly and efficient antivirus engines. And you become one of these grim, humorless guys sitting in a conference room in an industrial park hotel, sipping free, lukewarm OJ, and trying to figure out if highly redundant network attached storage arrays will help you sleep better at night.

I try to think that there's a third option to this; that I can continue in this career and avoid the path of a paranoid neurotic with high blood pressure and bandwidth costs on the brain. Mornings like this give me pause though, especially, when I realize that most of the folks in this room are big shots from huge companies, and their best attempt at humor has more bitterness than the coffee that I'm sipping from.

"what's your window for keeping data?"
"I'd peg it at ten years, four months."
"why so specific?"
" 'cos that's when I retire. After that I don't care what happens to it. Huh-huh-huh."

I left about half way through the seminar, silently glad that all the topics that I cared about were covered in the first hour and a half. And as I passed the crowd of men gathered outside, talking on their cellphones to check on things back in the office, I have to fight the temptation to just drive home and call it a day.