I do tech support of enterprise firewalls. It's kind of fun, but it's not just the PCs I've been dealing with forever, so I have to really try and pay attention, and I can't just screw around like before. I've fixed systems that are essential in some way to things like hospitals, police departments, casinos, something to do with NASA, big banks, etc., but it's not direct enough for me to avoid the occasional feeling that what I do doesn't especially matter.

I kinda flip-flop between wanting my work to have a direct effect on people's lives, and being satisfied with digging into a new and complex system and mastering it. Just coasting along here until I figure it out, I guess.

I'm 24 and still figuring out what to do with myself. Haven't been to the full-course university, just CCNA courses at the community college. I have vague interests in things as disparate as biology, English, foreign language, linguistics itself, sociology, and various physical and low-level elec/comp engineering, and no real idea what would make me happy, and certainly not the money or time to try all of them.

What really chaps my ass about this job is that it's never done. I guess very few jobs are ever done in full, but I never feel like I'm done in any sense. There are tickets that open and close, and are done with, but there's a steady stream of them, always getting more even before I'm done with my current ones, so closing one doesn't feel like anything. Getting them down to where I can see them all on one page feels like some mild progress, but it's all destroyed by the time I get in the next day.

So I think I actually want something project-based. This is what we need to accomplish, here's our resources, here's our plan, yay we did it, done. And then I can have a list of the things I helped to accomplish and not just a nebulous blob of trouble tickets the details of which I barely remember past a day.

But I do also like the idea of getting into sysadmin or internetworking, being one of the guys who keeps the internet going. And then when the apocalypse comes we can hide out in a fortified datacenter and start building the new techie world, huehueh.