this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore tools technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information to expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers welcome to the art of network engineering podcast my name is andy laptop known on the internets as permit ip andy andy and tonight i am joined by my best buddy aj mary what's up aj what's going on andy how you doing man i am well i am i am good i am studying every day i am working out i'm not sleeping enough so i need to work on that but that's my one complaint how you doing what's going on i'm right there with you on the sleep um but yeah no i i'm getting my my daily workouts in uh it's i think it's time to crank it up a notch and uh do a little bit more we'll figure that out though i don't have like a home gym set up or anything like that so uh i think i might have to get a little bit creative there um but yeah yeah no doing well works good works busy um doing some traveling next week and uh if i'm being completely honest i'm a little anxious about that i was hoping to keep my feet on the ground during the pandemic but duty calls gotta go uh i know i'm safe i know i'll do the right thing uh so i think we'll be all right but um other than that things are good man this is your first work trip i guess right since yeah i mean i've done like some local day trips here and there just like i've been able to stay in new england you know for for at least the times that i have had to travel and then like it was it was like the summer time and that's when the numbers were like really down and and um you know we had like the travel travel was like allowed or whatever like you know basically vermont new hampshire and maine had this agreement like if you're coming from any one of these states you were cool to like come and not quarantine and it was so it was all good it was all kosher um but now like you know as as you're well aware numbers are up all over the place so uh you know just a little on edge with that but we'll take it one day at a time and wash our hands wear the masks and be safe yeah yeah good man well good luck i'm sure you'll uh when is that you going a couple days next week you said yeah yeah so uh flying out sunday and uh coming home thursday night okay cool is mrs no blinky blinky uh upset that you're leaving and yeah yeah i i mean um this will be the first time in in a long time where she's like a home alone with the kids and so she's got a balance like you know getting the kids ready for their day getting herself ready for her day and so i think she's a little stressed out about it but i i know she'll be just fine yeah my wife's never been all too thrilled when i've had to a few times i've had to travel for work she's like really dude you're leaving me here with these these wild animals right right cool man cool so um i know we usually talk about any kind of wins we've had in our discord server do we have any wins to announce this time yeah yeah recently um i i'm hoping i'm saying this right holy sh tasks uh they recently passed their jncia devops nice exam uh that's a fun exam i did that one last summer uh so congratulations to holy sh tasks was that one of you on that one was that one of your five junus juniper certs you got uh yeah yeah i did the jncia devops the junos the uh jncda and then i also did the jncis devops and jncis service provider so jncia was the easiest right and i'm asking because i need to go for that soon yeah i mean those are those are associate level exams and i i wouldn't say it was easy right but it's it's associate level and after coming from you know studying for a professional level exam going back and studying for an associate level exam was felt not as difficult yeah is it comparable to cisco ccna um so i i mean i've taken the latest version of the juno so i can't speak for how it's ever been but um you know dan and i were talking about this a little bit last week on the show where the jncia junos is is kind of like a sweet mix between the cc ent because there are some networking basics on there but it's it's really more focused on the operating system like really digging into junos so there isn't really an equivalent uh exam on cisco right like they don't have like an exam on ios xe or nx os yeah um but yeah it's it's really focused on the inner workings of of the tunis operating system yeah i had it years ago at the noc because it was a multi-vendor shop there and i remember it being more difficult than i expected it to be and i mean i got it at the time and it's expired since but yeah i thought oh this would be a breeze i have my ccna i work on junipers it'll be fine and i yeah it's like oh glad i paid attention right you're right well when you're ready dude like jump into uh junos genius because i it's free i'm sure they're still doing some sort of discount on the exam voucher and the content was great like the the practice exams they give you at the end of the course they're they're a lot like the actual exam so like it really is preparing you to take the actual exam so i didn't expect to talk about this tonight and this isn't our topic but so to wrap this up so i i plan to use junos genius because everybody loves it and you take that practice thing at the end and you get a good voucher discount and all that i've recently been given the i don't know what juniper calls exactly but like their online digital it's a subscription learning service so i have access to that as well and now i have to make a decision like do i just do juno's genius or is it i guess it's comparable to like the cisco digital you know library that i also have so what did you use for your juno studies did you have that juniper learning portal thing or not i i did not have access okay yeah um i just had the junos genius um but i would say that if i i'm not sure because i've never used it but i think that if you have that uh subscription you can take self-paced courses and you actually get like a certificate of completion right at the end of each course to show that like hey i actually did this kind of thing yeah i was planning on just using that resource because it's paid and yeah maybe it's better than junior's genius but everybody loves genius you know i i think that stuff is probably a little bit more comprehensive because throughout the junos genius stuff it's like oh hey there's also this training too okay yeah little teasers of like hey come over here and want to know more click here yeah yeah there's some of that for sure cool all right well good stuff man so um you had reached out on twitter right and asking the fans hey uh what topics would you like to hear us talk about on the show and we we have a laundry list of topics to talk about so it's you know we haven't gotten to the point yet where we're so desperate that we're like hey hey twitter tell us what to talk about next week but uh we we really liked um so andre hug of thunder he's on the discord server right it's all about the journey yeah yeah so we kind of liked what he suggested which was you know what topic he'd like to hear us talk about worst job slash worst work situation um so you know what were your quote-unquote crappy jobs before you were a big fancy you know network engineer um because you know i i know like me when i was the cable guy in my truck um you know i didn't exactly have a job or career i was in love with and i was working toward you know the job i have now and if this show existed then and i was listening i think it would be helpful for me to be like okay you know this job isn't all that great but hey these guys who are at the quote unquote top of the mountain they've been here too and i can get there and so um do you i guess want to start us off like where would you start in your i don't know if calling it your crappy jobs is fair but you know how do you how do you want to frame this and where do you want to start you want to go i only had a couple of different jobs before i got into it so um i started my my career my professional you know career working or whatever uh as i think a lot of people do i worked at a grocery store right i got a job you know bagging groceries and then eventually i did like the whole cashier thing and so so how old were you were you a kid like this is before college i was i was 15. yeah and at the time like that was like legal age like that was the earliest you could possibly work here in the state of vermont and then there you know um at 15 16 you hit you could work but it was like reduced hours like i think the latest you could work at night was like seven or eight o'clock at night or something like that i don't know if that's still the case today but did you have to get working papers do you remember like having to do that when you were i remember my first job it was just like parents had to sign the job app or whatever yeah my parents had to sign some kind of like state forum that says like they're giving me permission to work you know as an underage kid yeah they called it working paper sorry i didn't mean to interrupt so you're at the grocery store yeah yeah i worked at grocery store for a few years and um that was actually kind of fun because um it was so i don't know if you have this chain where you're at but up here it's uh we got price chopper okay and i think now they call it like market 32 or they're going through like some sort of like rebranding or something like that and um it was kind of fun because the store that i started working at was like at one end of the shopping plaza and it was it was an old store it had been there forever and uh they were building a brand new one at the opposite side of the shopping center and so uh it was like the summer time and they would send me down there to do like all these like odds and end jobs and stuff like that like help stock shelves pull brand new shopping carts off the trailer get them all lined up in the in the corrals and stuff like that and it was a lot of fun because like i got to see like you know this whole store like being built and come together and stuff like that so it was pretty fun um the there was a couple of summers while i was working that job some both of my parents worked in manufacturing um and uh they said so they both work for a company called uh bearcrafter ski racks i i don't even know if it's a round anymore is that did you grow up yeah okay yeah um and so like if you wanted a ski rack for your car you you would like go and have you know bear cracker ski racks like installed like they did all sorts of stuff um and so i i started down there and it was just like summertime extra money kind of stuff like i worked i went to work with my parents you know they got up early uh you know we left the house like five o'clock we drove like 45 minutes half hour away to like get to their work and then we worked all day and then you know came home and then i went you know and did the grocery store thing at night too so i was working like two jobs for a couple summers and i just remember like my first day on the job and they're like showing me what to do and i like you gotta pick this part pick part do this thing and then it's just like wow this this kind of sucks and like there's there's a woman standing next to me she's like this is what i do all day thanks i was like oh i guess i'm just going to do this now sorry were you working alongside of your parents like were you in physical proximity to them there yeah yeah so like my my mom did quality control and so she was like always running around like checking on stuff and then my dad actually operated like some of the machinery and um but my dad hadn't worked there for very long um he uh he was a meat cutter by trade like he was a butcher okay he did that for a long time and um he did that for like a grocery store chain he finally got sick of it because you know he got called in on all sorts of hours doing all sorts of stuff he's like finally i like had enough of that so he he got into the manufacturing thing and worked with my mom for a little bit and um it was it was kind of funny because like uh i got stuck on this press machine where you would press in like nuts into like a handle so that you would like twist the handle on it was you know for a ski rack and uh and so like i'm doing this thing like all damn day and it's hot in there and it sucks and like and you're like right like you you you know what yeah yeah like yeah and my mom would come by and she's like how many have you done i'm like i don't know like you know and i'd shower at the bench she's like you're way behind you ever see will ferrell and elf when he's like doing the edge of sketches yeah how many done buddy yeah exactly same thing exactly but i mean it was fun it was cool to work with my parents a little bit you know we we had a good time um but i only did that for like a couple of summers or school vacations and then um after after i worked at uh at the grocery store for a little bit i went and i got a job at kmart we got a kmart up here we don't anymore um and uh and so i was just like you know general merchandise or whatever just an associate and stocking channel again right stuff like that what's that stocking shelves like yeah yeah just you know i'd work in like i'd bounce around between like the toy department automotive hardware sporting goods um and eventually i i became the sporting goods manager nice and um it was i was actually working there on uh on september 11th really when that happened and um it was it was pretty crazy because we didn't have anything in the stores right like there was no tv channels there was nothing there was no radio we had no idea what was going on uh and then like i stepped out and went to lunch and um i like the kmart was like really close to my home so like i would drive home for lunch because i had like an hour long lunch and i saw like i started to listen to the radio and it was like it was talking about all this stuff going on and the the radio station that i listened to was was classic at pulling pranks and so i'm listening to this and i'm just like this ain't real this is like one of their like their prank things and and it was it was very real you know like i get home and you pop on the news and it's like oh my god like this is really happening wow you know kind of thing so that was pretty surreal because everything that was in the store was like loops right like it was it was like like a tape somebody would pop in it would just play so many commercials or songs or something like that and then the tvs just played movies all day so like literally inside the store we had no idea what was going on and it was probably awful music right like elevator music oh barry manilow yeah not to disparage mr malo but you know nothing you want to listen to eight hours a day five days no no no way definitely not definitely not music that will not offend anyone in any way right like right yeah very very yeah yeah um that so that job was kind of it was funny because like i hit a point in uh one day the because i i worked there i graduated high school and then i didn't have any immediate plans you know so i just kept working there for a little bit and uh and this the store general manager was just like you ever thought about being an assistant manager aj and i was like super young and i was like kind of taking it back i'm like really like assistant manager and so i like i took it as a big compliment i was like yeah i know like i think i'd like to check that out and so you know they thought that it would be best to send me to another store to you know get trained to be an assistant manager so because they thought that it would be hard for me to earn the respect to my peers since i had worked with these people for you know a couple years um it's the funniest thing and this was like one of the things that kind of kicked me to be like there's more out there aj so like i start this training program and um the next closest store was in plattsburgh new york which is about an hour and a half drive away from where i lived in burlington uh and you had to take a ferry wow um otherwise you had to drive up like way north crossover bridge and then come all the way back down to plattsburgh and that turned an hour and a half drive into a three-hour drive so hour and a half including a ferry trip over the water yeah yeah sometimes it was shorter like if i if i timed it just right and i pulled up to the ferry and i like paid and got right on and then it took off you know but but most of the time i would pay and then i'd like sit in line for like 20 minutes just wait for the next one to come or whatever but when you're at that age and you don't have really marketable skills and a company like that says hey we want to give you more responsibility like that's kind of a big deal you know it makes you feel yeah great yeah it's it's the best thing you got going right like hey we want to make sure there's probably a pay bump there's a little more responsibility yeah but something happened where you're like yeah so so i started doing this training right and uh it was computer-based training and it would like taught you about sales metrics and like all this stuff and then um i start talking to like actual assistant managers that do the job and this one person literally said to me they were just like yeah it's it's real great you get paid a salary that's like you know 40 hours a week but you work like 60 minimum and you know it's kind of crap pay and it's just like well you're really selling it right now and so after that like i i kind of like the drive got to me it was like winter time and like it was just it turned a long drive into an even longer drive because traffic was slow going like uh and during the winter time up here they they reduce the number of trips the ferry makes because there's just not that many people so now you're waiting for the ferry to come right yeah yeah anybody like 17 18 right like you're relatively young yeah yeah i was definitely like under 20. i know like hey you're gonna work a lot and only get paid for a certain amount and was it was it kind of the dangling the carrot thing i came in if you do this you know for a few years and you can work your way up to like you know not assistant manager and was there any kind of that like like why would you why would you work 60 hours a week and get paid for 40 right like yeah i i always jobs like someday you're gonna be you know you're gonna be in charge of this whole thing and it was like a backbreaking 60 hours too because like you were you were constantly moving stuff around you were constantly walking around the store checking on stuff you were dealing with like mean people both employees and customers like it just you know even even then it was just like i don't know i don't really think i wanna i don't think this is for me yeah and so i you know i went back and i'm just like look i i really appreciate you thinking of me but i don't think this is for me retail is a tough gig i've worked a lot of retail gigs and yeah you're i mean it's it's all customer service so you gotta smile when people are giving you a hard time and everybody's complaining to you and it doesn't really pay that well and i i have a lot of respect for you know you do what you got to do and it's it's a tough gig in retail yeah yeah so that they let me step you know back down or whatever and and uh i did the whole sporting goods manager thing again for a little bit longer and um oh so you told them like this management thing is information yeah you know i don't think i'm interested in the assistant manager thing you know just like okay well we haven't filled your old position so why don't you just you know kind of take that back good for you for saying that at that age yes at that point just be like oh they might get mad yeah i got to do this huh i mean like it was it was probably like only a month or two in and and so i was just like yeah no i don't i don't think this is what i want um and so in in sporting goods i sold firearms uh you know hunting rifles shotguns we didn't sell pistols at least not at the kmart that i worked out we didn't do anything like that we had pistol ammunition that we sold um but you know you come in to buy a shotgun and or or whatever you have to fill out the atf forms and then i'd have to like call it in and when i talk to the atf i get a little special secret code word that i'm actually somebody that you know whatever and then i give them all the information and they they run the background check and it was so fun doing those background checks because you know like most of the time it was like it was it was passed and in the state of vermont if you you know at least back then like if you passed the atf background check it was like okay let's go ahead you know sell this gun kind of thing and uh there there's a few times where like i got the nope declined like you do not sell oh wow and and uh you know you you give you give the news like i'm sorry like you you were declined i can't i can't say again today he's just like is that because of this stupid plot thing that happened i can't believe that like he just starts like spouting off like you got you got a felon standing there and he knows i shouldn't get one he's like oh maybe maybe i'll slip through the cracks maybe the kid will forget to check me yeah yeah uh the other the other good one um i had a a guy come in uh and he was a postman like he was dressed up in his like his postal worker outfit right and um he wants to take a look at a 20 gauge uh pump shotgun and so you know he's he's looking at it and uh you know he puts it up to his shoulder he's looking down the sights and he's like lifting it up and down it's like wow this is nice nice shotgun and then all sudden he looks at me goes does this have a pistol grip and i was just like uh no no they're illegal right uh i i mean i was definitely seeing them around but that's that's not the kind of gun that we sold at kmart right like like you're not supposed to sell off the stocks like there's certain yeah tactical things that they just don't sell for reason yeah exactly like all this stuff was like hunting right right right um and so i thought that was kind of funny um then uh let's see oh yes yes uh i had a shotgun came through my store that had been involved in a murder show just took a dark turn and so uh one day i get uh burlington police department comes into the store and so i got two officers they're just like yeah we need to talk to you about a about a firearm that came through your store um you know we're tracing it for the manufacturer uh we're helping you know another police department that has the murder weapon uh and according to records like it came here to your store so you know what what can you tell us about it and i was like oh oh okay uh so that like they gave me the serial number so i had to go back through like all my records and uh it turned out it was a gun that had gotten sent to another store and was sold at the next door uh that were like close to where the murder took place wow yeah yeah but apparently yeah i had it on my shelf for a little bit didn't sell it somebody else needed it and so um you know some some other clerk sent it off to another store so the best part of this job was on the atf background checks and federal agents showing up i mean that was the only way you were getting any reprieve from you know yet another whitney houston song piping through the speakers in the store like right you're right and like you know that one of the nastiest parts about that job was the the building that the store was in was so under under kept it like they just they did not keep up the maintenance on it was a super old building and so anytime it rained you know the the the store had really tall ceilings and that but it was a drop ceiling so you had like all those cheap like tiles up in the ceiling and um when it rained the roof would leak like all over the place but the water would collect on these tiles these drop ceiling tiles and they would sag at first they would like expand and then they would hang and then they would break and on on the off occasion like a couple times i'd seen it like bust on somebody and it was like nasty like rusty water and and so after that happened um they they would like when it rained they would send me and some like other other associates around and we would have to like close off aisles where we could see the tiles were starting to expand and then uh they would send us around to proactively like bust them when nobody was under there so that way we could then clean up the mess and then just put a bucket and let the rain drip into the bucket it's just like so wasn't kmart like a gigantic national chain like yeah they call corporate yeah like yo can we get a new roof on this building right we have rain dripping on customers it was crazy it was crazy um so yeah that was that was pretty pretty nasty i i eventually ended up leaving there a buddy of mine um worked for a car dealership uh it was um it was a saturn uh and it was so weird about saturn it was like almost like a cult yeah like when people bought saturn's it's like they weren't just buying a car it was like a member of the family right like and people got these like really big emotional attachments to these cars to the point where like when they traded them in like you see people get like super weepy about like you know having to trade in this car because of all the miles they like drove it and stuff like that now hold on i used to sell cars and i don't recall saturn's even being all that great of a brand of a car right like were they like known to be reliable like i don't remember they're being pretty or fast or sporty or reliable like but these people were really initiated the initially the thing about those was um they were plastic right like they were molded like you know your shopping cart could like literally bounce off these things like there's only a couple of parts i think it was like the the hood the roof and the trunk lid were the only like metal body parts on these things so that was like a new thing like it wouldn't yeah in a parking lot right right and you like you you would have you know the the sales guys like when they're going around showing this off they would like punch the cars check this out you didn't want to do that in the wintertime though it was like negative 20 outside if you punch that right shatter so what were you doing there what kind of jobs uh so i did everything there like the only thing i didn't do there was sell cars uh and so that that dealership was a part of a chain of like four or five different uh dealerships and we had like a chrysler we had uh the saturn there was a nissan and then there was uh chevy and jeep we're all part of that chain uh and so the the two buildings that i worked between was a chrysler and a saturn and um that was a fun job so i started there as just literally i was just a wash boy like the service department like gave free car washes with every service that came in it paid more than than working at kmart that's what i was going to ask is that why you left it was a better job yeah yeah yeah right uh the benefits were a little bit better and and all that like literally like i would pull cars into the base for the technicians to work on after they were done i'd pull it out pull it up to a wash bay wash wash it sometimes people would pay like you know the 10 bucks to get it vacuum so i'd vacuum it out um and i did that job for like you know a couple months and then a position opened up in the detailing department so if somebody bought a new car we would detail it clean it up uh and then if somebody traded in a car we'd clean up the trade-in and get it ready to either go to auction or or be sold you know there at the dealership how were the hours because i sold cars and we worked all the time like did you have normal hours yeah i mean there was like one night a week we were open until like eight o'clock so somebody had to stay there in case someone like you know sold a car or whatever right uh and then there was like every saturday we worked and because we worked saturday we got a day off in the middle of the week it was usually a wednesday or thursday so not a terrible schedule for no younger that wasn't bad yeah yeah did you like this job it was good um what what i liked about it was like i love taking a dirty car and making it look new again it was like a craft man like it was it was so much fun doing that like i found some dirty ass cars there was some really nasty stuff i'm afraid to ask like is there anything pg that if a kid was sitting in the car listening to this that you know you could tell us what like something you found in a car i i mean most of the time it was because of the kids yeah stickers on windows that was the worst thing to have to clean off uh and then there was like all sorts of stains in the seats like food that had just been there forever bubble gum really comes out of seats like horrible anything unexpected that like you know you would expect stickers and gum from kids but like or find something like why is this under the seat like what is happening here adults are nasty people let me just tell you some some adults are very nasty people um on more than one occasion i found dog turds under the i have no idea why just they were now petrified okay so they weren't like in a bag that somebody picked it up and nope it was just no the dog just raw just raw on the carpet how does a dog poop in a car no idea and you gotta smell it like you would think somebody would clean it like i don't know how the heck they wouldn't know that that was there were these customer cars like they bring them in to get details yeah or they get traded in what was fun is like if somebody left like it depends on what it was like if somebody left stuff in the car sometimes it was like oh sometimes it was like you know it was cool for us to keep it yeah yeah but then depending on what it was like you know we would at least go tell like the sales person that sold the car and he's like hey you know just so you know this looks kind of important might be you know they might want this kind of thing but like you know if a car got traded in uh they had a really cool stereo in it and like the other custom like the person who sold it didn't want it back sometimes they would let us take it out if we had a factory deck to put back in there yep yep and so we usually had a stash of like factory decks for various makes and models of cars so that way we could like swap them in now so i just want to say in college me and my buddies had a house and we had a maid come like whatever it was once every two weeks and we would like the day she was coming we would try to straighten up a little bit so it wasn't so awful you know like because we have decent human beings it takes a special kind of person to know there's dog poop in the car bring it to a detailer and leave it there for the detailer to find like that's something and sometimes i think that's what they did that's some passive aggressive anger right there like yeah yeah that's like oh i'm going in for an oil change on saturday maybe i'll just pay the 10 bucks and have them vacuum it out for me i've had dogs my whole life and i've been driving a long time and i've never had dog poop in my car i don't even know how that i i don't know man um but that jet job was fun uh i really like detailing like it was so much fun to take a car that was like all scratched up and like buff the scratches out make it look like glass that was like that was i feel like that was a real skill because like you like sometimes i try to teach somebody how to do it and i can't tell you how many times i saw somebody like burn through the clear coat of a car uh you know with like a wool buffing pad because they just weren't doing it right um i i got to install every accessory known to man uh so i became like really good at that and so like now when i when i get my own vehicles like i install all of my own accessories like i put running boards on my truck because i know how to do that kind of stuff from working there so wow even just putting in a radio is no joke i've screwed up a couple times i had a i had a car my grandfather gave me burn to the ground because i i had an it was in college i was a moron and somebody told me i should get an amp so i had an amp behind my seat it was an old like oldsmobile delta 88 big old blue car big v8 and i tried to install an amp and you have to run power to an amp now i didn't know that you could run it just to the fuse box in the car i ran it out the driver's side door and then up into the hood and connected it into the to the battery well every time i'd open and close the door the metal door was slowly wearing away the insulation on the power cord so long story short i go to run into a cvs i'm parked in the fire lane i come out convenient my car's on fire there's there's liquid that the batteries shorted everything's on so my gosh the one time i tried to install an amp for my radio in a car the car burnt to the ground and i almost burnt down an entire shopping center there was literally firemen on the roof of this cvs like axing it making sure there weren't embers like wow so yeah you're much better at installing accessories i i pay best buy now if i need a radio i just pay the 100 bucks and i'm like you know i i mean i think you have to now right like i i don't know if you could do that you know because like i know with like um so most of my vehicles are gm we usually buy chevy um and i because of like onstars tied in there like there's so many things tied into the radio system now like i don't know that you know i think in some vehicles you have to use the radio interface to like adjust your your hvac like if you want the ac to turn on and all that stuff so like i don't even know if you can just swap out the system now it's crazy right yeah so are you still living at home like were you making it off you're living at home i mean you know so how do we tie this back into like our network engineering podcast like did you was there a bunch of crappy jobs after this was it you know uh the car dealership was the last one before going into it um i let me see was i living no no i was not living at home someone with a roommate why why did you make that pivot like what did something happen in your life that you're like i need something better so two two things happened that uh that really spurred me to say i have to do something more with my life um i was going to school at this time when i when i was working at the car leadership i was already going to school for it at this time so before that while i was in high school i participated in this program it was for the junior and senior year at the burlington tech center they have a program called aviation maintenance and you actually learn how to repair aircraft like like airplanes of all different types uh yeah and then like helicopters and stuff too so this is high school like a trade school yeah okay so you learned some of those skills and so and then aft after you do those two years you could actually there was like a three parts to a certification there was like the general the airframe and the power plant uh and so the general was just like basic maintenance for airplanes and stuff like that then the airframe was literally learning how to make repairs to an airframe and then the power plant was like aircraft engines and so after you took the first two years you could pivot to it like a post-secondary or whatever there was actually an extension of the school out at the burlington airport where you could actually go and finish the program but to do that like it wasn't a formal accredited school yet it was still a relatively new thing you had to like pay for it out of pocket uh and you had to buy all your tools so like you had to invest thousands of dollars into tools uh to go to this school so i was trying to save up for that right and i graduated high school in 2001 and that's when september 11th happened and after september 11th it hit the iron lines hard and one of the first moves the airlines did to cut costs was they laid off thousands of aircraft mechanics because you could have one certified person uh supervising 10 uncertified people and so i i just immediately i knew i was like if i stay this course like i'm going to struggle yeah right and i watched some friends of mine that that stuck to it they got their their airframe and power plant license and they struggled you know because they were competing finding jobs with these seasoned vets uh and so yeah um and then honestly like you know i'm gonna i'm gonna get real here because i always get real i'm pretty authentic the other thing that that caused me to get my butt in gear is um i i lost my dad um i lost my dad at 18 and i was working for kmart and that whole experience it just kind of like life is short yeah um and and so that kind of caused me to like start looking like okay what am i gonna do and so um the next year after he passed away i started college and i had no idea what i was going to go to school for i had no idea what i wanted to be when i grew up i just kind of knew like if i wanted to do something better i should get a degree and i i did not do well in high school right like i i was like an average student i wasn't shooting for the moon i just wanted to get through it uh and so it's not like i could go off to some ivy league or whatever like that so i went to community college locally and one of the classes i took there was computer programming and i had so much fun i was just like i don't know programming's for me but i really liked this i t thing uh and wait a minute you like computer programming just yeah okay no it was fun it was really cool like you'd sit there and like you know type away and like tell the computer what you wanted to do and then it went and did it it's like wow that's fun i wish i liked computer programming um but then i did a networking class and it's like oh okay all right here we go this is this is my jam was that the community college like you were getting introduced to some of the i.t stuff in community college yeah okay and so the degree program was like computer systems management was a two-year degree in computer systems management so after that i went to a four-year college and transferred my credits and got a degree in networking information security did you have to take calculus and computer programming in your first semester in that program uh not in the first semester no okay but was programming like one of the first things that you had to touch on so so the my original degree program was just general education right okay like just like like a gen ed kind of thing and um i took c plus plus as an elective like just you know i just like hey what the heck i'll i'll take this it's being offered this semester i don't you know i just needed to take some sort of extracurricular and you were good at that like you got it it made sense c plus plus you know that the final project really upset me because i i spent so much time uh staring at a black and white screen like all semester long i'm just like i want to add some color so i figured out how to add color to a c plus plus program that was basically just all command line stuff and it was like hundreds of lines of code just to get me to change color of text and uh we present our final projects and some people didn't have anything like working and after we we present all of our final projects the instructors just like you guys did all such a great job you all get a's it's just like what are you serious right now participation trophies exactly exactly but i i guess i can't complain it was community college right so oh man i wanted to be a computer science major in the worst way and the first semester was c plus and calculus and i tried so hard and it was just not for me yeah i got a lot of respect for you guys who can hack that stuff i've even i've even thought now like you know i i would almost want to go back and like i have a bachelor of arts and you know communications but i'd almost love to go through computer sci because i'm watching like you know what is that mit has the free courses like online i mean i'm literally now 20 years later trying to watch computer science courses just to get my head around programming and you know how all that stuff works so right well wow that's that that's a big pivot point man you you went through you know pretty big life-changing event i can see why that would uh i mean that's why i thought this conversation would be relevant for our listeners because you know we've all had not so great jobs and just trying to figure out our way you know through through life and how do you get from just the kid bouncing around with not so great jobs to you know this this awesome job you have now and i guess a you know big life event uh a lot of people i've talked to over the years right like something happens it's almost like watching a movie or a story arc or reading a novel like that's you know the character's moving along and then something happens yeah and you know what like had that not happened i i mean i was just on cruise control man like i was just getting up going to work you know i wasn't really i don't know striving for anything i didn't really know like i didn't have any goals like i'm just it was just like i'm just doing this for now and that's good enough like i was making money i could you know do fun things hang out with friends whatever like there was nothing really pulling or pushing me in any direction i was just moving along yeah and kudos to you i've been through some family tragedies kudos to you that you were able to lock in and focus given the tragedy that you know you and your family endured that you could get you know get in there and get through school and and learn and it's not an easy thing when you're it was it was a lot of motivation because you know my father like he always wanted more right for for the family like he didn't he didn't finish high school you know and you know because he was he was so young like it was a time where you know you were you were working with the family if you know you weren't going to school and so he just decided to just work with the family and he picked up uh i my grandparents owned like a general store in the small town where he grew up and so he that's where he learned how to cut meat was was right there in the family store yeah yeah kind of thing and so he you know he always wanted more for for me uh and always encouraged me to do more so it was just like all right you know like i'm doing this for you dad yeah that's that's that's beautiful man that's that's pretty uh that's pretty poignant and and i know that like our first episode um we we kind of talked about our career you know of our tech jobs and how you got to like where you are now so are there any missing pieces if somebody were listening like so right now you're in college and you're going for i.t yep does that story pick up on episode one like is there any missing pieces yeah no i mean pretty much like for for me while i was working at the car dealership um i was going to college full-time and a lot of my peers in my classes like they weren't working full-time some of them weren't even working like they were just going to school and like i would hear about them working on these fun projects and dabbling like and applying what they were learning and i had no opportunities to do that and so that to me that's why i just like i gotta break in like i gotta get an i.t job right um and in in the first episode i talked about how i saw a counselor at school that was like a like a professional job kind of counselor right like she helped you spruce up your resume like i so i brought her like this job listing i'm like i want to apply for this job like can you help me and this is why you're in college right i showed her my resume and she helped me rearrange it to display my skills that were pertinent to the job posting wow um and it was it was really cool because um i ran into her like shortly afterwards and i'm like hey i got the job and she's like oh my god i want to hug you but like i'm not supposed to kind of like because like there there was like a lot of back and forth between her and i and she she spent time like coaching me like this is what they're going to ask you be prepared for for this kind of stuff like she was really great at her job and then you know she's probably the reason why so many students like got jobs like right out of college thank goodness for those people i i can point to a couple people in my journey where they just they took an interest and they gave their time and effort and really helped me you know change change direction that's yeah that's really cool all right so is are are we at the end of the aj crappy job yeah network engineer superstar crappy jokes and if we have any new listeners who haven't heard episode one and want to hear how aj went from college to the first job to the top of the mountain where he's at now i guess you can go back to episode one and yeah and listen i guess all of our episodes are always available right i know like some podcasts you have to like go somewhere else and pay to get early episode all of our stuffs yeah i'll think on the website right always online you can go back to episode one and because i know if you look in the podcatcher like apple podcast it won't have all of them but i guess you could go to the website um part of it i think you have to like hit something in yeah yeah right well if you go to apple podcast and you can't find episode one you can find it at the art of network engineering.com all of our episodes are listed absolutely all right so you want to hear my crappy job too engineering cause you kind of teased me a little bit something about a grease trap so yeah well i i've had uh so i wrote a list right i was thinking earlier today i love my lists and i'm probably missing some jobs but i've had 17 jobs i started working in i think seventh grade and i've had 17 jobs since seventh grade and i can tell you that most of them were not great jobs and i was working them because i didn't have you know just so i don't forget to say it at the end i mean the the skill set that i've been able to accumulate and the certifications and the job and the experience and all it's all happened as a result of learning uh there's a book uh deep work by cal newport and he has this mantra of like learn learn a valuable skill become an expert at it and you will be i'm not giving it justice but learn something that isn't easy become great at it and you will have a wonderful career for the rest of your life um so it's a really great book but you know i know i never had a specific skill set that was valuable in the market that somebody would pay me well and be able to have a good la you know i was so um you know i won't go through all the 17 jobs because that's ridiculous but you know my my first job was a paper boy i was in seventh grade i was a terrible i was a terrible paper boy there was there was this big apartment building like 400 units over by where i lived and there was all these old folks there and i think my buddy had the paper out it was only like 17 customers it was the crappiest paper out ever and they were like 33 probably local papers or whatever but you know i would say 50 of the time these poor customers would get their paper because it was like you'd have to get up at four in the morning go somewhere and get the stack go over deliver them all and you know i'm in seventh grade like what kind of discipline or fortitude does the seventh grader have maybe elon musk did but me i was like ah some mornings i just didn't get up and and it's funny so every couple weeks you'd have to go collect from these nice people and i'm this little kid and i'm like hey i need my three dollars for the you know they'd all be like well i didn't get my paper these seven days and i don't know what i would tell them and but i was just you know i i apologize to those poor people who i was their paper boy because i was the most unreliable paper boy you know out there but but it was my first gig i wanted a job i wanted a couple bucks you know and i wasn't very good at that um got a job as a busboy the next year and i would ride my 10-speed bike 35 minutes across town to this italian restaurant and you know just just busting tables and a couple of my buddies were there and it was just uh you know just just just a kid job you know what i mean cashiers sandwich shops uh these are all like crappy three four dollar three four dollars an hour jobs you know what i mean like yeah you'd work eight hours you might clear 30 bucks and and a kid with no bills living at home you know it was fine i don't even know what i was doing with the money but so so i i gotta tell you early on when i was young i had friends that worked in food service and they would tell me some like horror stories and so i i vowed very early on in my life even as a teenager that i would never ever work in food service i got to tell you later in life i i was a waiter work i worked my way through college as a waiter for five years yes five years i was in college forever but um you know i developed such an appreciation it's so hard to serve people food people are so picky about their food and if you want a medium steak they might have a different idea the chef in the kitchen says it's medium the customer's all pissed and says it isn't you go back to the kitchen you're getting yelled at by the chef like it's such a hard job you're just in the middle of this storm and you're just trying to make these people happy and your whole living is based on these people at this table being happy with their meal yeah and all you're doing is taking it and giving it to the chef but everybody's mad at you so yeah but it's just giving now your income lies in the hands of the guy in the back yeah but i over tip everybody when we when we go out and eat just because it's such a difficult job and you never know if you hadn't done it but um yeah so they were kind of crappy jobs then i had an uncle who was a plumber so this is a great story um i was a plumber's helper and i think we were making five bucks an hour under the table right we like that was the best money i'd ever made at the time but so he had this job where there was this big park where we lived and he had to run a new water line from the street and it was i don't know 500 a thousand feet yards but a really long run he had the trench all the way through this park to this uh like utility building where all the guys that worked had and they were replacing a water line whatever they were doing there well anyway he gets about halfway across the run and he hits like the town sewer main there's this gigantic sewer main so there's like a 400 foot ditch that's been dug already pretty you know wide enough to stand in and it's pretty deep because i guess you got to get below the frost line whatever but he hits this mane so me and my step brother you know doing whatever we're doing and he's starts yelling and screaming for us to come over and we come over and the backhoe is sitting there and there is just raw sewage pouring out of this huge and it's filling up the trench now so oh no so he tells us you get on that side of the of the leak you get on that side i'm gonna run over and i forget what he was doing i know he's like diverting the trench to try to get the sewage before it spilled over and everything and we had like a you know a huge problem on our hands but he told me to get down in the trench stand in the poop and when it got up to my knees wave my arm and they would come over and redivert it so that it wouldn't get too high so this was like you know i might have been like 14 years old and i'm so happy because like uh you know i'm not a cashier making hey i'm making money it's under the table this is a trade maybe i'll do this someday and it wasn't long that i was like plumbing is not for me i'm i'm still i'm not only staying you know it'd be bad enough if you were standing in your own excrement this was the entire town main sewage line leaving town yeah oh my gosh so you know i'm real grateful for the job i have today ah right right i remember things like this but i worked in a couple different trades i was a plumber's helper i was an electrician's helper um my dad is a is a retired philly cop he was a sergeant and we had a bunch of cops in our family and you know he was a sergeant for a while and then you know i wasn't really lighting his fire it's not something he wanted to do long term so he went to school for carpentry and he's been doing that for you know decades and and he just loves it he's walking around whistling all day he's just the happiest guy ever and you know it's like that adage if you do something you love you know you never work a day in your life so you know he found what he's good at and his passion so i i worked with him for a year um i i was doing those jobs i started going to college computer science kicked my butt i tried to do something else i wasn't really just that i wanted to so so what what spurred you to want to go to college for computer science everybody in high school went to college yeah i didn't know what else to do and my mom worked for bell telephone forever and she said well honey i can get you a job as a lineman at bell telephone they started fifty dollars or what was it they started 50 grand a year full benefits you can retire in 20 years and i still kick myself to this day because i said to her mom i'm gonna go to college i'm smarter than that i'm gonna you know when you're a kid you don't know anything and i went to this private school and everybody went to college and you were supposed to go to college and i'd be retired by now if i took that job yeah you know i'd have a huge pension i mean don't get me started but so i just went to college because that's where the group went and i didn't know what else to do and in my mind you know people told me my whole life how smart i was and i i don't think i was all that smart but for some reason the people around me were like oh you could do anything you're smart and all that stuff so i believe that line and being a lineman for bell telephone to me seemed like settling like well i got to go to college and be whatever college becomes um and i always love i always you know as all of us we've talked about on the show i was always taking things apart tinkering i wanted to know how stuff worked i didn't really have a mathematical ability and and like i wasn't a programmer like you like i i wasn't really good at the math part of the stuff but the tact took you know the tactile i could take apart like a reel to reel and figure out what was broken and fix it nice i almost killed myself doing that once do not touch the fuse while it's plugged in do not take it apart and touch the fuse that was that was a mistake but i i liked you know i was a pre-physical therapy major because i'd hurt my back in high school and i thought physical therapy would be cool calculus weeded me out um i heard about computer science i'm like wow i love that kind of stuff computers were kind of new i'm really dating myself but um that was like a new thing you know back then and i'm like oh yeah that'd be great man computers that sounds like a good you know career calculus again c plus plus i just the majors that i was interested in kept weeding me out i just couldn't hack the the science and the programming and stuff and the math so um i stepped away from college i'm like this isn't really working out um and my dad was like all right if you're quitting school you're coming to work for me now i should tell you like my dad is my best friend he's the man he's he listens to all of our episodes he's going to listen to this he's like our our biggest fan yeah but you know he's he's an old school guy i mean he he was a marine he served during vietnam he was he was a sergeant in philly like he's he's a big man like yeah you know he so when he took me to work i should tell you that the fir i love telling the story and that's sorry dad but so the first day at work you know you're quitting college boy you're coming to work for dad right because he was going to teach me a lesson i think and i learned many lessons the year i work with dad and i'm glad i did it and it was some of the you know the most fun i've had at work but i learned a lot um the first day at work it was the dead of winter it was freezing cold and we were building an addition and you know an hour into the job i smashed my thumb with a big weighted serrated framing hammer now my thumb exploded aj like i don't remember if i could see bone but it was bad my dad old school tough guy takes me over to his van pours hydrogen peroxide on it tapes it up gives me the hammer and says back to work straight oh my gosh now when my thumb exploded in my mind the story was i'm going to go to the hospital i'm going to get fixed up they're going to give me a bottle of percocet i'm going to chill for like two weeks that was what 20 year old andy thought he was going to do you know what i mean maybe grab a coke crack a couple beers take my pain pills and you know play some guitar that's that was the epitome of what i wanted to do in my life at the time but i could tell you that whole month we built that addition i mean every single nail i drove shot pain through my body because my thumb had exploded so the lesson i don't know if i'd have to ask my dad i don't know if he was doing this on purpose to scare me back into school but you know that that was some hard knock stuff you know i was afraid of heights and we'd be 20 feet up in the air residing a house and we finished basements we built additions we built a tri-level cedar deck 100 degrees out for a week just dehydrated and manual hard work you know what i mean um i loved it like i love being outside i love working hard but man that's it's some hard tough life yeah it's it's tough life it really is so um that drove me back to school i think his plan worked and i worked with him for a year and i saved up a couple bucks i got my own apartment uh i went back to school and uh somebody i was seeing at the time you know she was like hey you know what about communications and i'm like is there calculus no is there programming no i'm like i'm in sold and that's how i was making my decisions in my life all right if it doesn't have calculus for permanent you know i can do it but it was a good program it was a journalism advertising thing and i'm really glad i did it but so anyway i waited tables all through college and and that was you know waiting tables is a good job sometimes but you're working nights you're working weekends you're working holidays i'm working mother's day i'm working christmas i'm working new years like it kind of i worked saturday night sunday doubles so my weekends were just nothing but work i could go in on a tuesday and make 14 bucks all night and like that just sucked and i needed that for like college and stuff so you know my first day my first day waiting tables at dinner you start out breakfast because you don't know anything they kind of work you up to dinner dinner's like the main show and it was a nice place we wore tuxedos but my first my first night at dinner i go up to this table and i'd bring the mortars and you know some warmed bread basket and you know take a drink order so i bring the bread basket and these two old ladies she opens the bread basket she looks at me she says this bread stale and throws it at me now this is like a metal heavy metal thing that the bread stuff sits in and she like wong it at me and you know so feeding feeding this was day one so feeding people is a very difficult job but again i didn't have any other skills you know you can wait tables or 10 bar and make a pretty decent living at least pre-covered before everything got crazy and um but anyway i i i worked my way through college worked in marketing i was a nurse recruiter which was awful um i was a used car a nurse recruiter so you know how we have technical recruiters yeah yeah so a friend of mine she's like hey i'm working at this place we recruit nurses i'm like what she's like yeah there's a national nursing shortage we're a staffing firm basically so it was so dirty what they would do i was just i was in desperate need for a job at the time i graduated college i got a job it was right around 9 11 the economy collapsed after six months of my first job i got laid off i wasn't working i had bills so i was desperate for something and and struggling and she's like hey you know come to this place and they were basically sales guys but what we would do and it was awful and i got out of there as soon as i could but they would walk into like a nursing home into the front door and talk to the administrators and say hey we're so and so we're here to help you with your shortage we have you know it's a sales thing you know we have a database of 30 000 and we want to help you and blah blah blah and then on our way out we'd walk out the back of the building and we'd start talking to their career nurses that had been there 10 20 30 years like hey listen are you happy here not really and would you like to make 50 more and so we go in the front door saying we're here to help you and then recruit their people out the back door oh my gosh sales dude so dirty wow so that was a job that was sucking the soul out of me and i wasn't making any money i was driving this crappy red ford tempo with the paint peeling off everybody there had like bmws and mercedes i mean it was just sometimes in your life are just like this can't be it i mean like it was just i think this was one of those jobs that i was like i have to figure out what i'm gonna do with my life because this my soul is now being sucked out of my body because i'm this is not it was dirty money i felt like it just you know and i really i really wasn't making much um so you know i obviously pivoted from nurse recruiter to use car salesmen because that's got to be better well i mean based on what you were saying about the nurse recruiter that sounds like the same thing i was making 30 grand a year as a nurse recruiter and my buddy was selling cars and he's like listen man we're you know you can come over here and double that sweet i'm in like i'm broke you know let's let's do it and you know i was good at selling cars but i can tell you that the i don't want to say the better liar you are the more money you make because there's different types of lies but it's almost like lies of a mission like so one quick story the cheapest car we had was seven thousand bucks and it was a it was a plymouth neon now these things would not start and they were only a couple years old these are all off-lease cars so like a two-year-old car with a brand new battery and it wouldn't start wow so a kid comes in i'm generally selling like lexus you know our mid our median was like a 35 000 car so a kid comes in and he can't afford that and i know he can't and i know the only car he can afford is this piece of crap car that isn't gonna start so like he'd be like hey i saw this neon online so i'd be like oh i think it's in the back let me check while i run to get the jump box tell somebody to distract them so i can go jump start the thing just to get it running he takes his test drive and then he's like i'll be back with my dad same thing like his dad comes back i'm like all right i got to go jump it while they're not looking and so yeah just you know that weighs on you after a while yeah just you know it's and these people trust me the whole job is to get them to like you and trust you in sales right that's why i like to bust aaron a little bit i know he's not in that type of sales but like yeah used car sales is the dirtiest sales there are i think and it was just a lot of omitting stuff like you know so that was another soul-sucking job it was just a couple years of like uh and you're working all the time and that that was a really but i started to get in this point in my life where i'm getting older and all my friends are graduating college and getting good jobs and getting married and starting families and i was just stuck like yeah i can't seem to get a good job and and at this point i was a college graduate but you know bachelors in communications without any internships it's it's worthless it's like an english degree like oh great you know english what value you know back to cal newport like learn something hard that's of value like i know english i know communications what does that mean who's going to pay you for that so yeah i picked an easy major and i paid the price you know in the years following graduation um so through a couple series of life events that would probably be too embarrassing and more than i i'd want to get into um i i lost well let me see you got what all right so i got fired from the used car job okay all right it's the only job i ever got fired from and so you know i feel like i have a decent reputation in the community and and i've earned that but as a younger man i'll just say i was a different version of me um oh dude we all were well right so nothing like i was as a young yeah you know like that's i was you know i was in my somewhere in my 20s and i was i was a bit of a you know i don't know i wasn't all that centered i'll try to think of a nice way to put this so my employer hears this they won't think i'm a lunatic but what happened was i worked there for a couple years it's a hard job i broke a sales record there three months in i sold 36 cars in a month wow it had never been done the end of the month my boss comes to me and says well maybe next month we'll hit 40 and walks away from me like it was never enough i just broke a record wow nobody had ever sold 36 cars in that store it was a new store so it was just you know it was just never enough no matter how hard you worked it didn't matter like it just that culture just kind of made me a version of myself i didn't like you know and i mean i was just mad so i go on vacation i go away for a week to mexico with somebody when i get back they're like yeah it was it was it was pretty nice and calm while you were gone so we're we're gonna have to go ahead and ask you to just pack up your stuff and you know because i was i was unhappy like i was unhappy and i just couldn't hide it anymore and i didn't feel like it was a really great culture you know yeah maybe there's people who can be abused and be okay with it but i was verbal like i didn't like what was happening and i was working really hard for them and we weren't making all that much and it just i don't know what yeah you know it wasn't a good fit in the beginning it's like hey i'm making more after a year or two like man this really sucks and yeah i'm tired of lying to people and they're not paying me enough to lie to this many people so yeah i got fired from that job and that was kind of a pivot point there's another one coming up and i know we're getting toward the end so i'll speed it up and wrap it up but you know getting fired from that job kind of made me stop and look and like wow the past like six jobs i've had have been real crap jobs and none of them have been fulfilling and my life's really not going the way i would like it to all my friends are graduating school and getting these good jobs and and moving on with their life and here i am stuck like i'm in my mid-20s and i just i can't seem to you know to get it right and to at least get my career off the ground so um long story short uh i love the technical stuff and i couldn't get there through college i thought you had to be a computer so we talked about this i thought you had to be computer science major and i just couldn't hack it so that's that's the lie that we were told right like everyone just oh you got to go to college if you want to make it anywhere do anything you know build a life for yourself you got to go to college and i'm not knocking college and i'm going to push my kids toward it but but yeah like i bought into it and i listened to it and i gave up you know i could have had a 50 000 job at 18 at bell telephone and here i am almost 10 years later barely making 50 grand selling my soul hating my life like i would have been over six figures by then if i went to bell so yeah it just so i wanted to get back into tech my life kind of was a bit of a mess it was just you know it and i i always loved that stuff and there was this verizon job at a central office and i just blindly applied i'm like you know what it's tech my mom used to work for verizon so i just i applied it was a summer hire it lasted about a year it it was great my my best friend zach who was the best man at my wedding you know i met there and just those little fortuitous things you know throughout your life like but that got me back in the tech and the stuff we were doing it wasn't all that complicated but i was i was in tech and i was you know working on circuits and running lines and dealing with text calling in and and that kind of so then i knew this was a temporary job so then i i applied to comcast and i'm like well i you know maybe i could be a tech there and a cable guy and i got that job and that's it so i finally got into tech and i started to like build my career um the second pivot point was i got hurt about four years in as a cable guy you're climbing ladders all day you're drilling through concrete like you could go to a job and have to grill drill through concrete walls like 10 times in a job you got to you know run the lines through all the different wow and that was like every day so you're just drilling concrete day after day carrying ladders like it's just it's a very very physical job i'm grateful for it and i can't say anything bad about it and i wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that job right but it was almost like working with my dad it was very physical we weren't treated all that great nobody liked you showing up at you know your company you know um so so i got hurt at the job and and i went out on workers comp and long story short they send you to their company doc and i go there and you see my hand is physically swollen he's taking x-rays he's like oh wow you're you're messed up you know he's like all right we're gonna get you better so i'm in physical therapy like three four days a week whatever and a couple weeks go by and my hand's still killing me but the swelling's starting to come down and one day this doctor he calls me into his office and he goes okay tomorrow you're going back to work i'm like you you said i'd be like months until i'd be he's like well you're all better now like but i can't you know i i can't hold anything without shooting pains you know going up my arm and my hands killing me and he says well you're all better i've decided you're going back to work i said well well doc something changed about him like he was affable and nice and we had a relationship i i i it almost seemed like shark eyes like he just his eyes changed and he just went into like some different mode the company's paying him yeah and they all have a vested interest to get me back to work as soon as possible they're not looking to just pay me to not work you know what i mean so unfortunately as a laborer and a big company who you're just a number at they're like well you know you've been out two weeks you're all better now and the doctor decided that so so this is really the pivot point i had i said well i i park in busy roads for my job i have to park in a busy road put cones up try not to get run over by cars then i have to climb ladders with all this gear so and not get electrocuted so that i can plug into the taps and check levels and stuff i said i need both hands because you're supposed to use both hands when you're ascending a ladder descending ladder yeah he looks at me and says well kid you better learn how to do your job with one hand straight right so unbelievable to me that was like okay this company does not care about me i am just a number and they're telling me that they don't care that this you know all the physicalness of this job over time has screwed me up they're like well you're going back to work dude so um right around that time i also met my now wife so okay i'm at a company that i know could care less about me telling me to climb 30 feet in the air one-handed which is illegal per osha but that's not what the show's about um so you know they don't care i'm on my own here and i i met my my wife and you know there's there's people that are in your path that you meet and it's kind of fortuitous afterwards so there was a lineman at comcast uh ricky and you know i love the tech and i'm talking to him and he was smart and you know he the lineman knew more than we did because they're working out on the plant and he's like man y'all look into the ccna man like it's it's a really cool program you know we're putting devices on a network and there's people blah blah blah yeah so he kind of put that bug in my ear and then this whole you know injury thing happened and then when i got back from being out hurt my buddy randy who i got hired with as a cable guy he was actually in the cisco netacad and he invited me to the class and i sat in and that you know and the rest is kind of history and and you know we've talked about the rest ad nauseam but you know for me i've had a lot of crappy jobs i learned that a lot of companies don't really care about you you're just a number you're there to do a job and yeah you know they they could replace me as a cable guy for instance they could replace me there's hundreds of people if not more that would love my job yeah and if i can't do it they'll find somebody else um i don't work in that environment today i have i have a specialized skill set i have something that not anybody can do they can't bring somebody and train them for a couple weeks and have them climb poles as an example right um so you know per that cal newport kind of advice um you know and and to be honest with you aj like i think of these jobs there's days that i i'm not having a great day and i'm frustrated and i just i'm like god i can't stand this and then i try to remember like oh yeah one of the jobs i didn't discuss and i know we're getting done so we'll wrap up but one of my jobs between verizon and comcast comcast took forever to get back to me that their hiring process was slower so the verizon job ended i needed a job and i found this thing on craigslist 11 an hour drive a truck i'm like all right man i got a license i can drive a truck sure what they failed to tell you was you were going to drive from restaurant to restaurant cleaning grease traps oh no now a grease trap if you don't know is this big metal thing that is under the big triple stainless steel sinks at a restaurant and all the greasy utensils and appliances that they clean if you didn't have this special thing called a grease trap to trap the grease it would go out into the sewer mains and clog the whole city up because that used to happen so it's this box and we go out maybe every four to six weeks so you'd open the top of this and it's a moist environment because there's sink water flowing through there constantly and there's you know 15 pounds of accumulated grease that's been sitting in water for six weeks the smell isn't something you forget so i did that for a couple months while i waited for because you know i'll do anything if i lose my job today and can't get another engineering job i'll go down a while i'll cut lunch meat like i'm going to provide for my people you know so yeah i hear you i'm the same way yeah i needed a job and cleaning grease traps man and i'll tell you that was a pretty nasty job but i was working people who told me they can't find a job now i get it kovit maybe this doesn't apply pre-covered i've had so many people throughout my life oh i can't find a job i don't want to hear that yeah i guarantee you you can go clean grease traps for 11 dollars an hour because nobody wants a winner pizza go get go get a job no you might not be manager or ceo of a company but you can go find a job sure yeah so the worst the worst thing that happened to me in that grease trap company and then we'll wrap it up i guess is um so we also did some light plumbing work oh boy and i got sent to a friendlies restaurant for a call on a clogged urinal in the men's room so here i am trying to get my life together all my jobs have stunk i'm waiting to hear from comcast like this is my life i guess i'm walking into the bathroom and i got i got like the snake and you know there's like the metal pole with the snake and then the thing you spin at the top so i put the one end of the snake in the urinal yeah i go to flush it and it's clogged so i put it in and i start spinning the top i don't know anything about plumbing they just hey kid go you know sorry so i start to spin it on the top and as you know the metal now starts to bind up because it's not whatever i did was wrong but the thing at the end that was down in the dirty water all of a sudden just like caught and spun and sprayed dirty foreign from this friendly all over me including my face i wear glasses at the time pee dripping off my glasses so yeah i've had when i think that i don't like my job today i usually think of my grease trap cleaning job and the day that i got spattered with what i got spattered with and i thought well it could be a whole lot worse my life's pretty good i should be grateful for you know when i compare myself to somebody who's like kicking butt and they're working for wherever and they're like you know super architect guy or cisco or whatever and i'm like oh i wish i could do that i compare myself to myself i'm like you know what i've had some really bad jobs and i'm on top of the mountain now i have no reason to complain it's it's hard to keep that perspective but i think if you've had a tough paper route coming up that pain's a little closer you know like oh yeah i i'm really glad that i'm not you know climbing poles with one hand or cleaning grease traps or getting far in pp spraying in my face and you know what like i i think that that's that's a really good message right there like you might have a crappy job right now but every single thing that you have been through contributes to who you are and and why you do what you do you know and so it's a crappy job today but it's it's like it's the the kick in the butt you need to do what you're going to do tomorrow and it's like that butterfly effect thing like you have no id you have no idea what you're doing now and when i look back you can only get perspective looking backwards and you can't see tomorrow and you can't see around that next corner right but i don't know what would have happened if i didn't take that grease trap job and i don't know i might have found something else and it wouldn't have been like if i made any different decisions and i wish i had made a few different decisions but if i made any different decisions like i would have met my wife i wouldn't have my kids i wouldn't be a network engineer at this company doing a job that i'm just amazed that they let me do like so for me i almost had to go through all that pain and suffering and nonsense because that's how it works if right wasn't my path i wouldn't have met you we wouldn't i mean just none of this would exist so it's if you're in that crappy job and you're studying for that cert and you're trying to climb up out of where you're at you know if i don't know it's probably overused but like if i can do it anybody can do it i'm not all that bright as much as my family wanted to tell me how smart i was you know you give me a hard math problem or any computer science you know programming problem and i'm just a hot mess but you know you you can get there it's just you gotta hang in there and know that you're gonna look back and be like wow you know if your job is worse than getting far and peace sprayed on you then maybe you do have it worse than me but i have yet to talk to anybody who's had a worse job of that and if somebody like me who got paid to do something as awful as that can do it you know i think anybody listening here can you know someday look back at their laundry list of crappy jobs and be like wow it all brought me to where i am today and today is awesome so yeah you know you'll get there awesome absolutely so i guess i'm supposed to wrap this up this is my first like trying to host here so uh dude you're killing it man what do we what do we do here i'm i'm out of gas after the pp story no i i mean i i think that's i think that's a good note to end on right like the crappy job you got to use that stuff for motivation like it can't just all be anger and frustration like use it you know use that to fuel your next move you know like like you know you you hurt your hand and getting told that news by by the doctor and everything and then you start talking to people about the ccna and that that's what fueled you to make your your next move because you wanted better for your life you know pain is the greatest motivator at least in my maybe there's people out there that do it differently and better but you know i heard somebody say i don't know if i read it but like there is there is no comfort in evolution you have to be uncomfortable you have to struggle you it has to hurt you know to to to to get better right so yeah it's all it's it's all for the good but it stinks going through it you know at the time but look at us we've had some pretty crappy jobs and here we are and people actually care what we're talking about they want to they want to listen to us if we can do it you can do it exactly don't forget that all right so i don't know how to end it do you want to how do we do you know how do we end the podcast hey man i think it's just i think you did a great job thank you for sharing your story i know i've learned a lot more about you as a person and uh and just you know knowing more of your background uh you've definitely been through some incredible stuff so i appreciate you sharing your story with with me and uh with our listeners and i look forward to learning more about you in the future for sure hopefully my employer doesn't hear this and fire me soon i don't think that's gonna happen eric if you're listening i'm a good guy man all right well i guess we thank everybody for listening it's been great we'll have stuff in the show notes um if you're studying for a cert and you want some support we have the it's all about the journey discord uh server i think we're up to like i don't know nine hundred and something members now which is just looking before we started recording the show we are at uh 946 almost uh almost to a thousand which is incredible you can hop on there it's free everybody is is in there you know helping each other out yeah which is got some active study groups i know we got a ccna study group on thursdays encore i think started or is starting soon we got 100 days of code going uh lots of people doing a hundred days of code and there's people in in various parts of it i think a lot of people started on january first but there's people all over the place so don't feel like you know you missed the boat or whatever just just jump in just jump in yeah i'm in 100 days of cloud right now if you got any aws questions that are very simple and basic because that's where i'm at in my studies please reach out i i can tell you what an acronym means at this point but uh yeah gotta start somewhere join the community get involved um thanks for listening subscribe to us right all that good stuff absolutely and as mr aaron says see ya hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net edge that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network engineering dot com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you