Driving up to the semi-large brick building I assumed what I was getting into. It was a standard business-conducting type building covered with tinted windows and a sign stating the name of the business. Outside I met a tall man wearing khaki pants, a blue polo shirt, and tennis shoes. I expected to see a man wearing a suit and tie but instead was greeted by a man with a picture I.D. lanyard around his neck, glasses, somewhat un-kept hair and a key ring with at least 20 keys dangling from his belt. “Hi, I’m Alden and I am the systems support tech. I am responsible for everything that is plugged into a wall in this building and half of the things that aren’t,” he says to me as I am suddenly getting the hint of the massive amount of responsibilities this I.T. guy has.
I walk into what I had pictured as an office building through a set of tinted sliding doors and step onto a rug that says ITT Technical Institute in a vibrant royal blue. I am not in a place of business but in fact at a career based trade school. A type of school that has always had a presence but has become increasingly popular in the last ten years due to changes in the economy and people wanting an education past high school in a non-traditional setting. I follow Alden past a secretary’s desk and follow through a hallway lined with linoleum tiles to a door. The front of it reading Systems Support Tech, however once the door opened I was greeted with a separate sign reading, “Go Away.” I was given the distinct impression that this individual does not play well with others, unless the others happen to have a keyboard and a motherboard. Alden puts out fires for a living. No, he doesn’t climb a ladder into a burning building or rescue a kitten from a high tree branch, Alden spends most of his time receiving emails with headlines stating urgent, please read now, or the more common occurrence is getting phone calls with the first sentence being, “This isn’t working.” This IT guy is in charge of keeping 240 student computers and 80 administrative computers connected to the internet at all times, kept up to date with the most current software and computer security measures, and educating users on the basic know-hows of standard operations for using the network he keeps running. If someone so much as isn’t able to log into a computer on campus, Alden gets a call and has to fix the problem immediately. Walking into his office is like entering the world where computers go to die. There are whole computers, computer parts, wires, screws, empty computer cases, computer monitors, printer parts, and somewhere among the chaos is the resemblance of a desk. A mad scientist lives here and he likes to experiment and bring to life computers. As I sit down on the only scrap of a seat available in his office the fire alarm goes off. Alden gets a page that the printer script isn’t working. For us non-tech people it means that the printers won’t print and there is no one else available in the building of over 400 people that have any clue how to make the printers do what they are supposed to do because Alden is the only one employed to fix these problems and let’s face it, who would want to be under this constant pressure and not get paid for it. So the lone IT guy and I set out for our first wild-west adventure to the LRC room, which is also known as the library. My eyes and mind try to keep up with what he is doing as he surprisingly sits down at a computer to fix the printer. I was under the assumption the in order to fix a printer, one sits down at the printer, not a computer. He pulls up at least four different diagnostic windows to find out why the printers aren’t printing and after about 20 minutes of reading computer languages and terminology that I can’t comprehend he figures out what the problem is. Unfortunately for Alden in order to fix the problem he has to log onto every one of the 240 student computers and make a small edit to something having to do with the printers and re-run it. Someone like me would think that the printer not printing would be a relatively easy fix and wouldn’t think twice about the time that would be spent fixing the problem, but after putting out this fire with Alden, a new appreciation emerges. If this is considered a small fire, what does the uncontrollable wild fire look like? That is when Alden leads me through a few locked doors and opens the door to the server room. This room looks like a bowl full of colored spaghetti with all of the colored wires connecting the important things that keep this building running. If someone wants to be an Information Technologist, they better know their colors. There are gray, black, purple, blue, powder blue, white, red, yellow, and orange spaghetti noodles throughout the room. Without this room and its multi-colored rainbow of wires, none of the computers in the entire building would be able to talk to each other, print, or access the internet. This room is the most vital of all the locked rooms that Alden has access to. This 5 foot by 4 foot room is the heartbeat of the building. My assumption of what an IT guy does has been completely turned up-side down and we haven’t even hit lunchtime yet. There is a lot more to taking care of a building full of computers than just sitting in an office and goofing around on the internet. Without our electronic friendly computer guy our businesses, schools, and even our homes would not be able to function in the ever growing tech savvy world. These workers are under appreciated and often forgotten about unless something goes wrong. So in asking Alden why he continues to be the IT guys he laughs and says, “Something has to pay the bills. Really though, I get to tinker with electronics all day long.” So how do you avoid over working this computer firefighter? Reboot your computer and take it slow. Nine times out of ten turning it off and on will fix your problem.
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