Technology has always been a passionate part of my life. As a child, I used to imitate the Saturday CBS Evening News anchor, Bob Schieffer, and record my own newscasts on my Fisher Price cassette recorder. From there, I graduated to building a spreadsheet of every one of my baseball cards, but I gave up when the file reached the limits of early 1990s Microsoft Excel and a 3.5″ floppy disc. Yes, this is what I did for fun as a child who owned well over 50,000 baseball cards.
From there, I moved to building a custom “database” (read: fancy Excel sheet) for my uncle’s business and converted all of his paper files to a digital roster compiling a decade of clients. Pretty cool for a 15-year-old, I’ll grant you.
In college I had the opportunity to work for my college IT department, eventually taking on special projects for professors and staff for the last two years of college. I was, in essence, the help desk helper monkey (somewhere, I still have an ID that says as much) and I did everything from rebuilding server closets to migrating an entire collection of digital imagery to a Canto Culumus Digital Asset Management deployment.
After college, I moved to the Detroit area and got married. By happenstance, I met someone who was starting up a Catholic high school that needed some IT help. It started as a consulting gig, helping identify USAC e-Rate vendors and making sure there were some basic technology resources for the first year of the school. By year two I was building a Computer Applications curriculum, and by year three I was splitting time between teaching in the classroom and building a full-fledged IT department. I developed the first website, ran the school social media accounts, and handled the helpdesk on the side. I did that for eight years and its a big part of my story.
In the summer of 2016 I took my talents from Southwest Detroit to downtown, joining a technology firm that started in Kalamazoo and added a Detroit office in 2015. I’m a managed services engineer for clients all over the country, but the bulk of my day is supporting clients in greater Detroit. Servers, network infrastructure, email, helpdesk, you name it, that is what I do.