I'll give you guys the long story.
When I was a kid I had a bunch of surgeries to "correct" a medical problem that will... never go away. And when I was young I was huge into soccer. So I was a jock, I did sports, I loved soccer, but then I would have surgery and be taken out of the sport for a year with almost no physical activities I could do leaving me stuck inside either playing nintendo or PC. Which generally meant I was sitting in front of a computer for a year or two as a kid and a teen because I couldn't do what I wanted too.
After quitting a job for surgery, I needed to find a new job afterwards, I was 16 and needed to do something. I ended up landing a job as a Lab Technician at Ritz Camera, because the manager said I wasn't mature enough to sell (oh god if you can only imagine what I saw when I was 16 on a roll of film.... I think I wasn't mature enough for developing film :-P). Not really "IT" per say, but I fixed our giant printer, messed with the circuitry, installed new parts, took out parts, helped people from district fix our registers when they'd call in. Surprisingly all of our registers were command line even up into the companies final days. I found all of this kind of fun.
Ritz began to flounder as many of you know, having financial struggle after financial struggle and I came to the realization I like computers, I find them interesting and this company isn't going to give me a future, I need a way out. Due to lack of training I made a leap to Best Buy. Wanted to do Geek Squad, ended up doing sales despite my attempts to not do sales. But this did afford me one real new challenge that Geek Squad didn't. I had to know my product.... believe it or not I said "I need to know what I'm talking about, I don't want to lie to people" (I did once, and oh lord that guy tore me a new one). Best Buy offered training classes on a website you could do during work hours assuming you were slow, or up to two hours a week at home they'd pay for stuff.... that two hours of home time I went past... I went past far... and didn't care. Windows 7 was brand new, had tons of cool features, i series processors were coming out doing hyper threading and crazy new tricks, IT WAS FUN!!! So in a sea of salesmen saying "what the RAM does is it rams into the CPU to speed it up" and you had me.... a guy who to management took an initiative to learn new things. I legitimately did, it wasn't to excel as a Best Buy employee, it was because it was cool... and I'm apparently a great salesmen so... I shot up the ranks quickly, senior in the computer sales department in roughly a year or two. But I didn't feel complete...
A girl came to work there part time because she was a full time government employee, and just wanted the discount. After working for Best Buy for a couple months, they kept telling her she had to work more hours, or work during hours she wasn't available, and made it an effort to quit. But... she wasn't going alone... She knew I was the most tech savvy person in the whole store (tootin' my own horn, a thank you, a thank you) and asked me if I was interested in getting a job working for her mom. I was confused, I mean... I know I didn't want to be in retail my whole life, but could I put down my salesmen skills and focus only one what I wanted? Was I ready?
You never fail if you never try right? So here I am, two years in.
I just like helping and talking tech.
jk btw.