Hakuna Matata

It's amazing how the whole "circle of life" thing from the Lion King sometimes works. I've been at my company for 10 years (and endured countless therapy sessions as a result of the job), but am now considered (by one or two people at least) to be among the "higher ups" here. Of course, I'm viewed by others as the nerdy schmuck intern that the "real" staff had to sneak into bars 10 years ago. Today was one of those days where, as far as I've come, I had to go back to my roots. One of our clients was having a major event that wasn't properly planned, requiring the production of massive quantities of material in not nearly enough time. We have one guy who handles production jobs, and this was way too big for him alone, so my colleague that was running the event called me (in full-on panic mode) and asked me to "find people" to help. She needed at least 2 in there to make things run smoothly, but we only had one intern (the people that would normally pitch in on this were all at the event). Trying to be a good boss-type, I didn't ask anyone on my team to volunteer, and instead rolled up my sleeves and got in the trenches, just like the good (or less shitty) old days. My fellow slave laborers are both fairly new, and weren't fortunate enough to see some of what I saw. I couldn't help but think of some of the fun times that I had back then...

Our "original" IT guy didn't really know much about IT, or responsibility, or showing up to work. He also had a massive drinking problem. There were times (many times) that our mail server would crash. I was the first one in the office and as such, the first one to notice. Once the boss types found out, they'd call IT guy, who never seemed to have his phone turned on. One such morning, the "big boss" burst into my cubicle, the vein in his forehead throbbing like it had never throbbed before. He told me that "our shit didn't work again" and "the asshole" wasn't answering his phone. He told me to get in there and see what I could do. As I've said before, I'm completely self-taught and really had no clue how networks were supposed to work. I tried to calmly explain this to boss-man, who was now turning a shade of red I had never seen before, and he told me he didn't "give a flying fuck" if I "burned the damn place down trying to fix it," but we needed email and I was our best shot (as frightening as that may be). I went into the room and started throwing out random commands like I did in college when I was trying to crack a prog or hack a site, and somehow, magically, it started working.

Of course, once "the asshole" found out I was capable of fixing it, he started calling me, asking me to "work my magic" whenever the server went down and he was too hung over to come in.