The long way round to IT
I've taught physics, handled bank complaints, run a foreign exchange counter and trained AI models. I have never had "IT" in a job title. Anyone who grew up in our house would find that hard to believe.
This is the story of how I got here, and a love letter to a strange, brilliant era of computing.
Late 90s, early 00s: owning a PC meant maintaining it
Nobody handed us a locked-down device. We had a beige box that broke in interesting ways, and if it was going to work, my older brother and I were the ones who'd make it.
LAN games were the gateway. Playing games with mates meant hauling a monitor and tower round to someone's house, then working out why it wouldn't connect. We figured out IP addresses and workgroup names, and why one machine could see the others but not the other way round. Nobody called it networking. It was just getting to the game.
Then wireless adapters arrived and everything got more chaotic. Drivers came on a CD that didn't match your exact card revision, and the signal dropped if someone used the microwave. You learned to read an error message properly, because it was the only help on offer.
The rest was just life with a PC:
- Drivers. Hunting for the right one on dial-up, installing the wrong one, rolling back, and learning why that mattered.
- GPU upgrades. Checking the slot, the power supply and the case clearance, and finding out what happens when you skip one.
- Patches. Windows Update before it was automatic, when installing a patch was a decision with consequences.
- Dying drives. The click of a failing disk, then recovering homework from it with a deadline of "before school".
- Windows 98 onwards. Reinstalling every few months because it had slowly rotted, backing up first and knowing which drivers I'd need afterwards.
- Custom builds. Choosing parts, building a workstation, then upgrading it piece by piece to keep it alive.
- Linux. A distribution posted to the house on a CD, days of waiting, then booting it with no idea what I was doing and loving it anyway.
None of it was a course. It was curiosity plus necessity, which might be the most effective way anyone has ever learned IT.
Then life happened
The dream faded. The route into IT wasn't obvious back then, and nobody told me that tinkering counted for anything. I went to university and studied physics, then became a teacher. In between came customer-facing work at Capita and FEXCO: phones, complaints, tickets, triage, escalation and SLAs.
I don't see that as wasted time. I got good at the half of IT support that plenty of technical people struggle with, which is helping someone stressed who has no idea why their computer has stopped working.
Coming back
A few years ago I started tinkering again, and this time I did it properly. I run a home lab on Ubuntu Server with Docker Compose, and I write up what I learn as I go.
What I used to take for granted
For years I treated all of this as "just stuff I did". Looking at it now, I'd describe it differently:
| What I did | What it's called at work |
|---|---|
| Getting LAN games talking to each other | Network troubleshooting: addressing, name resolution, connectivity |
| Fighting wireless adapters and drivers | Driver and hardware compatibility management |
| Rescuing homework from a failing drive | Data recovery and backup practice |
| Reinstalling Windows 98 every few months | OS deployment, imaging and recovery |
| Upgrading GPUs and PSUs | Hardware diagnostics and fault finding |
| Installing patches carefully | Patch management and change awareness |
| Booting Linux off a posted CD | Self-directed learning with no safety net |
| Calming down an angry customer on the phone | Incident handling, escalation and keeping people informed |
| Explaining Newton's laws to Year 9 | Explaining technical problems in plain language |
Plenty of people can reset a password. What I do well is fix the fault, explain it kindly to someone frustrated, and write it up so the next person fixes it faster.
So here I am
I didn't miss my path. I took the long way round and picked up skills a lot of direct entrants don't have. The kid who recovered lost homework from a dying drive was doing IT support all along. Now I'd like the job title to match.
If you're hiring for a first line or service desk role, get in touch.