You may have said or heard people say:
“What does IT do?” “Just do your magic” or “what will IT break now?”
IT is a very complex industry that everything runs on. Payroll, accounting, call center statistics, recordings, medical records etc. all usually touch an IT platform somewhere. That means there are IT geeks all over the place taking care of all these items. As was said in The Wizard of Oz – “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” IT does a lot of things behind the scenes. Most systems that everyone takes for granted are monitored 24 X 7 and people fix issues before general users know there was a problem.
I have spent many nights talking to technical support from Asia back to the US so systems could be functional by 8 AM Eastern time when something would go wrong on an upgrade. How critical is your e-mail system? See what happens if it was down for an hour during the day? Or what if your voice mail system goes out? Then we could all use the While You Were Out notepads again.
IT is a field that many of the technical minded people “Drink from a fire hose” when issues occur. These issues become very critical in a matter of seconds and the “reminders” of this fact come quite quickly when a system goes down. For call centers, if calls are not coming in,t hat means revues are being affected and that effects the bottom line as well as public perception. Especially if an issue occurs Monday morning.
Many times people say if you go into IT, you will be “swimming with the sharks” because you could jump right into an issue that may seem like routine maintenance and turn into a several hour fix and several days of explanation and root cause analysis. IF you are part of “IT” you could be a savior or a scapegoat depending on the department or site you walk into. SO as the Boy Scout motto says “Be Prepared”
The IT GEEK That Can Speak 