>> Being able to see how everything fits together.
I can walk into a McDonald's and see that they have computers lined up and if one
of them is giving off a blue screen,
I automatically start thinking, "I wonder what's causing that?
Could it be this?
Could it be that?
Is it connected properly?
Did they insert a new piece of hardware to this machine that broke it?"
So being able to analyze certain situations like that, it's great.
And then the flexibility.
I'm not tied down to working from one central location.
I do go into the office, I'd say more, nine times out of ten I'm in the office,
but I do have the option to do work from home.
And that's beneficial especially working in the D.C. area
when the metro is not quite acting the way it should or I have something else to take care
of at home, I have that flexibility.
The biggest challenge is the new equipment that comes in.
I had about three, let's say two to three good years
of actual IT experience before I obtained the job as a network engineer.
And from that point I worked up from a tier one level, tier two, tier three,
system administrator, up to being a network engineer.
So that being said, there's still things that I don't know
and there's still technology that I'm not experienced with.
So one of the challenges is definitely walking into a room or walking into a data center,
for that matter, and seeing a new switch and not knowing what it is,
or how to set it up, or how to configure it.
And knowing that it's different, that's a challenge because that means, "Okay.
This is something new that I have to learn on top of everything else I'm doing."