Don’t panic

For the last several months I have been immersed in a whirlwind of changes due to the renovation that has been going on at the main office.  Just hammering through the obstacles associated with moving staff to a new location, gutting the old space and putting it back together from an IT perspective is pretty immense.  However that isn’t all the changing going on. We are also in the middle of an 18 month project where we are migrating most of our back end systems to the cloud from an in house cobol solution, yes cobol.

To say I have a lot of simultaneous demands on my time, skills, and patience would be an understatement.  I find it funny when some people from the outside look upon my job duties and think I must be some sort of super genius to be able to do what I do.  Although some degree of intelligence is required, to me a certain personality and mindset is much more critical.

Although my list of personality defects is rather lengthy, I possess some traits that definitely help me manage my job responsibilities.   I am a good troubleshooter.  I may not always know the answer off the top of my head but I do have a systematic and reliable thought process to get me to that answer in a reasonable amount of time. I always am thinking about plan B, C, and D if plan A doesn’t get the job done.  I don’t procrastinate.  Putting stuff off to me that could be done immediately serves no purpose and only leads to chaos and poor performance in the end.  Finally, I don’t panic.  When the pressure is on, instead of locking up, my brain is constantly navigating a path to an eventual solution.

I have worked with many people in IT that do not have some and maybe none of these traits.  They struggle to keep their heads above water as a result and may even find themselves out of the profession by their choice.  I feel very fortunate that after a lot of dead ends as a young adult I managed to somehow stumble into a career path that played both to my natural personality traits and my personal enjoyment of computers.  Not many are so fortunate.