Speaker 0 | 00:09.627
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we have Eric D’Atelier with us, Head of Information Technology at StockMirror, is that correct? Stock Meier. Stock Meier. I’m just, you know, if I think I’m going to say it the right way, I say it the opposite. I think that’s like a psychological thing.
Speaker 1 | 00:27.982
Yeah, always go with your first enjoyment.
Speaker 0 | 00:31.483
What do you guys do over there? Glue stuff? Some spray things on?
Speaker 1 | 00:34.844
Make urethane products. Make products like cracks and stuff. You know, all sorts of stuff. Plastics and urethane. Cool,
Speaker 0 | 00:43.807
cool. Healthy to inhale or no?
Speaker 1 | 00:47.312
Oh, honestly, the working environment is really safe. I’ve been over there. They just tell me don’t drink anything. You know, don’t drink any of the products.
Speaker 0 | 00:57.380
Super cool. Super cool. So what’s the daily grind like over there?
Speaker 1 | 01:03.945
When I came on board, a lot of the things was, we had a lot of projects around security and, you know, process. So that’s primarily what we’re doing. We’re a member of ACC. the American Chemical Council, and they’re kind of similar to what ITIL. They have a lot of policies and stuff, but we’re really building around procedures. But the big thing, and I’m sure you can know and the audience would know, is that security is so big right now. That’s primarily what my team and I are working on is keeping everything safe. Disaster recovery and business continuity are the big things right now.
Speaker 0 | 01:42.535
Yes. Yes, for sure. Well, I would hope disaster recovery. I think disaster recovery has been big for like the last, I don’t know, 20 years. Yeah. Let me ask you this. With the security piece going on, and I like to keep things to the theme of, I guess, speaking the language of business and IT, recently, because there’s a gap between the… The language of IT and the language of business and constantly bridging that gap, so to speak. And there’s different categories, I would say, and one of them being end user communication and speaking to end users in ways where they don’t gloss over and wonder what the heck are we talking about. And I would imagine there’s a lot of end user communication that needs to go on when you’re dealing with security. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 02:40.048
I agree 100%. In fact, one of the things I like to do is, and I just started this actually, and as you know, is keeping the end user from doing something that would harm the system. I mean, if you think about it, a large part of issues that happen inside your network is not malicious, but a user doing something that they shouldn’t have been doing. So education is the big part of it, and speaking a language which the end user understands, where it’s not, just like you said, their eyes aren’t glossing over and they’re just… they’re tuning out what you’re saying. But what I like to do is I send out questions like, hey, do you know what this is? Or, you know, little quizzes and stuff. Or just, you know, try to get people familiarized with some of the terminology that we use. And I tell my guys, one of the things is, when we’re out there, you’ve got to speak, you’ve got to know your audience. So when you’re talking, try not to talk above anybody’s head. Try not to utilize a lot of acronyms. I was in the military for a long time, so one of the things is… you become familiarized with acronyms. And when you get out and you’re in the civilian world, you keep using them and you’ll get that look every time. So I try to use, you know, industry standards, but also stuff that people would know or people be accustomed to.
Speaker 0 | 03:53.468
As far as the security piece, it sounds like you guys had it easy from an acceptance standpoint with executive management because you kind of had to do it. Or was there any battles there with executive management and trying to get, I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 04:06.060
Zero battle at all. When I came on board, our CEO, he understood maybe better than most. In fact, I’ve worked a couple different places, and they tend to write IT off. Here, our CEO, Kristen, he’s really security-driven. He’s IT-driven. He believes technology will take us quite a ways. There was no argument. If I said we needed it and gave a really good reason, he didn’t fight me at all. In fact… he vandarted a lot of the foot for safety and security.
Speaker 0 | 04:40.426
Why do you think that is? And is there any insights there for it? Because obviously you’ve worked at numerous different places. We all have once we get to a certain point in our career and there’s different cultures. vibes, I guess, so to speak, and views of technology, whether it be a cost center or business force multiplier or whatever it is. What is it about your organization that is so positive towards IT? And is there any type of insights that someone could take away?
Speaker 1 | 05:17.834
Well, I think on the leadership side, on the senior management side, they’re educated to the technology. They see it as a, they see it as a, they’re, um, as a jump off point as something that you like again it’s a force multiplier um not to mention we sit uh we have offices in germany the uk and france and as you know europe is having a struggle right now what’s going on over there so i think that’s the big thing he holds you know at the top of his thought process so i think that’s one of the things and again he likes he likes technology and i think a lot of you know leadership, CEOs, and again, we don’t compartmentalize a lot of that. So in some industries, you’ll see that they have a CIO or a CTO that handles all of that, and the CEO never gets involved, or the senior leadership on the non-IT side, they don’t get involved in it. They leave it to that particular segment of the business. But here, we’re, you know, it’s a normal organization, and they tend to… He reads up on stuff that our chief of staff is the same thing. And even my, I report directly to the CFO, you know, he’s, they trust, you have to build that trust. And I think that’s a big thing too.
Speaker 0 | 06:35.786
The reporting to the CFO, we definitely have two different languages there. We’ve got, you know, your, your, your, your networking languages, and then you’ve got your, I guess, profit and loss, so to speak, you know, I hear the
Speaker 1 | 06:56.135
P&L statement at least once a week.
Speaker 0 | 06:58.237
Okay. So, so how did you, how did you come to learn kind of that, those different language terms, whether it be, whether it be gross margin, controllable costs, ledger, you know, EBITDA and stuff like this. Like what is there, did you come to learn that over time or do you know it now?
Speaker 1 | 07:20.172
I do. I do. And one of the things is, and I think that’s a really good question. probably several of the guys out there in the IT world will tell you, stock compliance. So I’ve been in the industry a long time. I was there during Enron and all that stuff. And what had happened is I had worked for a company that was publicly traded, and we ran into something similar. I won’t name the organization, but, you know. But after stock regulations were put into play, you get that. I mean, you’re forced that bit of information. And I think it’s because they lumped IT and… I don’t know. accounting and the similar buckets when it comes to security and, and, you know, anytime SOX comes into play, you know, you have all that, you know, you’re working with the accounting team to, to, you know, make sure that you’re, you, you have policies procedures and all that stuff into play. And there’s a lot of intermingling that happens with the language. So you, you do learn it over time.
Speaker 0 | 08:17.700
People love to use. I remember. In the past life of working in the corporate world, people love to throw around, that’s a Sarbanes-Oxley violation. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 08:25.758
Everybody wanted to be the Sarbanes-Oxley champion until it was time to do Sarbanes-Oxley stuff.
Speaker 0 | 08:35.046
You didn’t file that correctly. Oh,
Speaker 1 | 08:40.591
yeah. You have to have separation of duties.
Speaker 0 | 08:42.913
I just remember this big filing cabinet and someone yelling about a Sarbanes-Oxley violation.
Speaker 1 | 08:48.750
I think people loved anything in the dark and dark, so they would either not have to do it or not have to explain it.
Speaker 0 | 08:56.833
Yes. For other IT people growing up, how did you get started in the IT field of work?
Speaker 1 | 09:06.917
Well, I was in the United States Army. I was an airborne paratrooper. I was in the 82nd Airborne Division, and I served 10 years in the U.S. Army. My last hit, I was at… I’m from Maryland. I worked for an organization at Fort Meade. I was a military intelligence. And so when I got to go, when I wanted to go to school, I talked to a buddy of mine who was an attorney. I thought I wanted to be an attorney. He’s like, man, there’s no money in being an attorney now. IT is the way to go. And this was in the mid nineties. And I was like, he might know something. So I decided I’d go into IT.
Speaker 0 | 09:43.772
Some attorneys still make a lot of money. Oh,
Speaker 1 | 09:46.362
some attorneys. I worked for a law firm. I can tell you some attorneys make a lot of money.
Speaker 0 | 09:50.827
So I don’t, you know, maybe that wasn’t the best advice, but it might be. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 09:53.750
I think it’d be a lot less stressful if I work as an attorney. I don’t know.
Speaker 0 | 10:01.158
You never know. Well, actually, I had someone bring up stress the other day and how… it’s hard to turn off sometimes. The IT job, how do you turn it off? Sometimes you can’t turn it off.
Speaker 1 | 10:15.452
Yeah, no, I agree. And that’s something that’s hard to turn off, especially, and I will tell you, the majority of your listeners and you yourself probably know this, if you care about your reputation and you care about the organization that you work for, it’s almost impossible to turn it off. At night, I worry about my backups. I worry about, you know, do we have anything in play? I worry about somebody clicking the wrong button. You know, I worry about the power outages. and you’re constantly you have that worry what you do you find things to get your mind off of it um but again you’re gonna it’s something that you’re gonna it’s like being a parent you know you can’t turn being a parent off you have that worry after your kids leave the house you have that worry i liken it to something like that it’s probably not as severe i have three children so i know um but uh i think it’s it’s very similar to that if you care about the organization you work for and you care about the people in the organization you you worry So I don’t know that you can turn it off, but there are probably ways that you can formalize it or just lessen it. Like I know one of the things is as soon as I got backups into the cloud and encrypted, I felt better about that. As soon as I got a disaster recovery program and a business continuity program into play, that helped as well. So if you’re minding your P’s and Q’s and doing your due diligence, you put stuff into play so that you negate some of the worry. But it’s always going to be there.
Speaker 0 | 11:35.433
Hmm. So the army gave you your technology experience or no, it was after that, after college? No,
Speaker 1 | 11:41.995
no, no. I was an infantryman and jumping out of airplanes. And then I re-enlisted and went military intelligence. And no, I didn’t, I mean, hardly touched me while I was in the military.
Speaker 0 | 11:54.598
Do you still like jumping out of airplanes?
Speaker 1 | 11:57.759
No, I haven’t. I haven’t jumped out of a plane and it’s been quite a while. In fact, most of the guys that I was facing with, they’ll tell you I didn’t like it when I was doing it. You’re treated differently because you’re a paratrooper. People think of you differently when you’re a paratrooper. You wear a beret.
Speaker 0 | 12:25.094
There’s something about jumping out of a plane that just makes me nervous. I don’t know what it is.
Speaker 1 | 12:29.236
Thank you.
Speaker 0 | 12:30.977
You know what I mean And then I watch these Like the wingsuit guys Have you watched any of those wingsuit videos It’s just insane It’s like one of the most deadliest sports That’s like out there right now Either you’re doing it really well Or you’re stuck on a rock Yeah or you’re doing it really well You just need to make one little minute mistake And you’re dead
Speaker 1 | 12:53.876
People say you need a parachute to skydive You definitely don’t You just need a parachute to skydive
Speaker 0 | 13:08.143
oh man crazy so so no so so you just went to college to get into technology so you weren’t like a nerd growing up like you weren’t playing with computers or anything like that do you remember your first computer no it was funny enough is when i was in
Speaker 1 | 13:24.567
i graduated in 1985 um we had a um a spiry like uh like an imp unit at the school that they showed us how that was about it um so in the 80s computers weren’t huge they weren’t a big thing back then oh no there was like punch cards at most well no 85 we had apple 2c i guess yeah yeah yeah we know we talked about the apple but no i um i was i ran home and joined the army i ran home and joined the army yeah but i got out there i went to the pain university and and i think on venture to get you know just give But I worked in technology while I was going to college, which really did help.
Speaker 0 | 14:03.363
Okay. What was the most helpful?
Speaker 1 | 14:07.326
As far as being immersed in it, things like learning a language or something. Being immersed in it and you go to class at night and you’re like, oh, I just did this or I know how to do this because I did that a week ago. So there were things that you’re doing in the real world. And I would say that IT, similar to a mechanic. It’s best to learn hands-on. I think doing it while you’re, that’s one of the reasons I really like trade schools or these two-year technical programs. They’re fantastic because it’s all hands-on. You’re immersed in the training and they teach you like it’s a job. So I think being immersed in it really did help out. And again, I have a set of fallacy disorder, which I think a lot of IT guys do have that. You know, so. That was a big help too. And having the regimen of being a service member, that discipline helped out as well.
Speaker 0 | 14:59.385
Where does it get in the way? Where does OCD get in the way?
Speaker 1 | 15:03.346
Um, well, honestly, I have OCD so bad that if I don’t make my bed every morning when I wake out in a specific way,
Speaker 0 | 15:12.073
the world will end. So that gets, um, that’s crazy. Yeah. I remember my friend, he’s like, I could not go to bed at night. He, my, I had a friend OCD. He’s like, I just, I cannot go. He’s like in school. He kind of like, I don’t know if he taught himself out of this. He’s like, but I could not go to bed unless I was laying lengthwise, like with. the width way across the bed, upside down with my head looking a certain way and flip off the light switch this way. Like I just could not go to sleep unless I turned the light off that way.
Speaker 1 | 15:36.293
Oh, that’s, that’s a, that’s a different, yeah, I don’t, um, I think, I think the big thing with me when I came to OCD is doing things in a very specific manner.
Speaker 0 | 15:44.681
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 15:45.262
And, uh, you, and you know, this in the IT world, you can’t be too regimented. You can be organized. You know,
Speaker 0 | 15:51.107
it’s like a blessing. It’s like a blessing.
Speaker 1 | 15:53.369
Exactly. Yeah. Oh yeah.
Speaker 0 | 16:01.179
Well, my, well, my strength, I tell her it’s my superpower, but, um, this is great. Yeah. Uh, it’s my superpower. All right. So what else? We got to hear some more. We’ll turn into an OCD show. OCD IT.
Speaker 1 | 16:11.589
Um, I think a lot of guys in our, in our industry,
Speaker 0 | 16:17.054
what else? Um, okay. So you got to make the bed a certain way, like military style. I do make my bed in the military. I corner the sheets and do all that stuff. Yeah. Okay. So, well, we all, I mean, I can’t remember who’s the guy, who’s the, the motivational speaker that talks about making your bed every day. Anyways, I can’t remember what it is. The Admiral. What is his name?
Speaker 1 | 16:34.672
Admiral.
Speaker 0 | 16:37.074
Yeah. Basically, you know, it’s like one of those, you know, uh, what do we say? Viral videos or something talks about, you know, making his bed every day. What else do we do? What is there any other OCD things throughout your day? Oh,
Speaker 1 | 16:50.225
no, no. When I, when I go, I have a shower at a specific time. I dress a certain way. I have a morning regimen. I worked in Pittsburgh for a law firm. When I would walk to work, I had to cross the street. I had to walk on one side of the pole and then cross over to the other side of the pole. It was a whole weird thing. But that’s like, it’s been so well that helped me out with IT.
Speaker 0 | 17:13.526
It sounds fascinating though. To me,
Speaker 1 | 17:15.507
it’s like… Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 17:18.730
It is. I hope I’m not offending you. It sounds amazing to me.
Speaker 1 | 17:25.376
I was in the Army. You can’t offend me.
Speaker 0 | 17:29.819
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 17:34.203
William McRaven. He was the Admiral McRaven.
Speaker 0 | 17:37.405
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 17:38.446
He’s the guy who makes you bed every morning. Does it help? When I go home, when I leave work and go home, I go to the gym, but after I go to the gym and go home, my bed’s made. I don’t have nothing to worry about.
Speaker 0 | 17:47.850
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Even if I had a bad day, he says, even if I had a bad day, at least I’m coming home to a nicely made bed.
Speaker 1 | 17:53.754
I don’t know if that works, though. I think if I had a bad day, I go home. I’m thinking, I’m not, the last thing I’m thinking about is my bed.
Speaker 0 | 17:59.058
My bed is made. Yeah, yeah. I’m like, tear it up.
Speaker 1 | 18:02.300
I think the way I made my bed ended my first marriage.
Speaker 0 | 18:09.545
Oh, man, that’s possible.
Speaker 1 | 18:12.147
Although, I don’t know. If I had to make the bed, it’s pretty hard at it.
Speaker 0 | 18:15.369
Like, it- you know, it was like, you’re like, it ended my first marriage, but it, it made my second marriage. You know what I mean? Cause it’s like, I don’t ever get to bed. I’m like, honey,
Speaker 1 | 18:25.193
I got stories about a second, my second marriage too, but I don’t know if there is. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 18:33.557
I had more dates than I did. Uh, um, I’m jumping out of a plane, honey. Um, what is, Let’s talk more about some IT stuff.
Speaker 1 | 18:52.864
Okay.
Speaker 0 | 18:54.526
And I want to hear your… I’m looking on kind of like this wheel that I could spin of topics that we could talk about. It doesn’t sound like you have a very hard time influencing executive management to buy something in IT there. Really? How about… How big a team do you have?
Speaker 1 | 19:15.594
I have three of us. And again, it’s a nimble team. I have me and a network engineer and kind of a technician. He’s like a senior level technician.
Speaker 0 | 19:25.177
How do you guys all work together as a team? Is there any kind of like insight that you could provide into coaching a team, setting expectations, driving towards a goal, roadmap, making things happen, that type of thing?
Speaker 1 | 19:40.561
One of the things is being a mentor. Um, the guys I work with now, they, they, uh, one is, I think this is a second position. And, and again, like you said, I see guys tend to move around. We tend to move, move up, we move out. So, um, so in order, it’s one of the guys I work with now, he, he’s kind of a younger guy. He’s like mid thirties, I guess, not even that old. Um, Being a mentor and learning what the strengths and weaknesses are of your team and the personality. So one of the things is if you have a guy that’s good around people, you want him to be out there. You want him to be forward facing. So I think that’s something that’s important is knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the team. And again, as a manager, my job is to backfill when they can’t do it. I jump in. But being understanding and remember that you have. humans working for you, that they have lives and they have needs and wants and be there, be a mentor to them and be understanding and they’ll work for you. One of the things I say is that we succeed as a team, but if we fail, I failed as a leader. So, and I take that to heart. One of the things is that I want to guide and direct. And if there’s an issue with it, you got to take that on. You have to be accountable. And when your team sees that you’re accountable, they’ll definitely perform. And that’s a big thing is if you’re going to say it, you got to do it and, and, you know, be, be a great, figure yourself as a leader rather than a manager.
Speaker 0 | 21:07.914
How do you, how do you stop from just, how do we bring the team together to just stop just managing the, the blinky lights and keeping things up and running? Is there any, is there any light at the end of the tunnel in it, so to speak, as far as, you know, building a self-maintaining system and, you know, putting your legs up on the desk and sitting back and being like, ah, it’s over.
Speaker 1 | 21:35.198
If you’re, if you’re that kind of guy, I guess you could.
Speaker 0 | 21:39.500
I think the answer is never. I think the answer is that’s like a, that’s a, that’s like a mirage, you know, but there’s gotta be ways to make life, there’s definitely ways to make life easier and to offload, you know, workload and to make things easier for yourself.
Speaker 1 | 21:54.068
And that’s a great question because if you think about it, The way that you can negate some of the problems, some of the stresses, to make sure your team is ramped up and knows what you know. I think, and I’d like your opinion on this as well, but big team guys, especially smaller groups, they tend to, what’s the word I’m going to use, the hard, uh, poor knowledge. You know, they don’t want anybody else to know what they know because, you know, then, then their job is not, their job is not.
Speaker 0 | 22:22.010
Or they think they’re in jeopardy. I think everyone does that in general. Yeah, I think everyone does that. I think people want to hide their secrets. They want to hide their skill sets. Yeah, because they’re more valuable if they do. But really, you’re more valuable if you can, you know, I guess, lead people and do all that. Yeah, I’ve definitely known a few IT guys that kind of kept the keys to the castle, so to speak.
Speaker 1 | 22:48.905
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 22:51.487
And I just, I’m thinking of one now, which was in what really, what really, what I think he did was create silos. What he ended up doing was creating silos in his company because he had complete control of the network. So imagine a network, a 10 gig network with 300 locations and you’ve got this multifaceted, like, you know, like this just amazing, beautiful, like WAN, like a 10 gig WAN, right? That’s your baby. But the company’s so big that you can kind of hide away in the server closet, so to speak. And there’s other aspects of technology within the company that you could have affected and really made a difference on, not only to the bottom line. or efficiency and everything, but you could have really ended a bunch of outages, but you didn’t want anyone touching your network. So here’s the example, right? You have a 10 gig network, but then you’ve got hundreds of MPLS, like VPN on net circuits running 150 different phone systems.
Speaker 1 | 24:07.531
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 24:08.152
Right? So, and a person… that I remember with a spreadsheet managing the daily outages.
Speaker 1 | 24:17.992
Oh my God.
Speaker 0 | 24:19.313
Needed a spreadsheet to manage the tickets of daily outages of all of these different PBXs running off of this older kind of MPLS slash PRI and sanity type of stuff. And… So anywho, it could have been solved very, very easily via like, you know, a software defined networking solution with some SIP trunking. Oh yeah. And running over like this, you know, like you have the highway. It’s like the highway is there and you’re using like the dirt road off to the side because there’s no on-ramp to the highway. It’s now like, no, you’re not getting on my road. You need to pay a toll. You must pay a toll. It’s just hurting. That’s how I saw the interworkings of the politics in that company. And then you had maybe a CTO at the top, revolving door of CTOs and CIOs with other massive technology, all kinds of other technology issues that kind of where this network guy could kind of hide out in the background because all the other issues were so problematic that he was just like, I designed this network. And I’m.
Speaker 1 | 25:37.470
going to sit here actually i worked for fleming and he bought some other companies and when i went down to do a upgrade to a um within uh adel adel georgia and um what he had done is every every port on the wall one number on it like you know he numbered them but every port on the on the back panel on the back in the mdf and a different number didn’t match but he had a book that he kept at his house that cross-referenced him. So if you remember, it was 45 at the wall. It was 1640 at the patch handle. He had told his book, and he thought it was protecting his job. He was the first one we fired.
Speaker 0 | 26:28.429
Give me the book and the stickers.
Speaker 1 | 26:32.212
We didn’t even ask him for the book. We just started. We just started toning lines. You have a good point. The larger the organization is, you tend to have IT guys that can hide away.
Speaker 0 | 26:44.678
Yeah. That just reminded me of like the Rubik’s Cube. Like you basically had the Rubik’s Cube where you just remove the stickers and put them where they’re supposed to go.
Speaker 1 | 26:52.181
Yeah. You can tell you, man, what year did you grow up in?
Speaker 0 | 26:59.984
Look, just take the stickers off and put them where they’re supposed to go.
Speaker 1 | 27:04.386
Exactly. I mean, I don’t even know how somebody comes to that kind of mindset. You know, they can’t fire me if they don’t know where the past has gone.
Speaker 0 | 27:11.532
I think they get, they get, I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 27:18.238
Well, going back to your original question, in order to, in order, like I said, if you want to get promoted, you got to make sure somebody can get backfilled. The only way to get backfilled is to teach that person coming up. So you’ve got to carry on.
Speaker 0 | 27:30.748
Yes. And that was one of the best. One of the best companies I’ve ever worked for and a colleague of mine now, former boss, basically said, okay, you’re promoted. We want to promote you, but you can take the job when you’ve filled your position, when you’ve trained. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 27:51.721
that’s good. That’s perfect.
Speaker 0 | 27:54.283
Yeah. Yeah. Once you train someone to take your job, you’re ready. Go. Okay. But yeah, that is a good, and that was a very, it’s interesting when you look at, when you look back at the different companies you’ve worked for, like the ones that were like very HR heavy and the ones that were not non HR heavy. And I really liked the companies that were non HR heavy.
Speaker 1 | 28:17.230
Some of my HR managers,
Speaker 0 | 28:21.633
I’m not. I’m just saying like, well, it was weird. Like I left, I left a company that was very by the book. Right. And. And I appreciated that from the standpoint of like maintaining, enhancing people’s self-esteems and making sure everyone’s treated equally and all that other type of stuff. Right. And then I went to a company that was maybe more like your military days. And I was like, at first I was like shocked. I was like, how dare they? You know, I’m going to call the 1-800-HR number. And they weren’t maintaining and enhancing self-esteem, you know. But what I realized was, is, man. I thrived. I really thrived in that environment and did really, really well. And oil and gas.
Speaker 1 | 29:05.635
And I don’t even know why we had an HR manager there. I mean,
Speaker 0 | 29:08.618
it was just insane. Just to have one.
Speaker 1 | 29:14.482
I can’t imagine the stress that she went on a daily basis. I mean, it was insane.
Speaker 0 | 29:18.765
She had to do the exit interviews.
Speaker 1 | 29:20.847
Come on. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. She was there because some law somewhere said that you had to have an HR manager.
Speaker 0 | 29:29.190
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Those make for some good stories.
Speaker 1 | 29:34.032
They’re notorious for that.
Speaker 0 | 29:35.693
Those make for some good stories. You could do a reality show on it. Oh, you definitely could.
Speaker 1 | 29:39.435
Oh my God,
Speaker 0 | 29:42.456
yeah. You and I have probably seen stuff, because I was in telecom back in the day, and it still is the Wild West. It really still is. Meanwhile, pharmaceuticals used to be… You used to be able to have pharmaceutical reps and they would go wine and dine doctors and there was no laws around it. And you’re wondering why a doctor is prescribing more drugs than anything, you know, and that’s just the truth. That’s just the truth. And then they cracked down on that. But there’s none of it.
Speaker 1 | 30:08.749
Thank God.
Speaker 0 | 30:10.069
Yeah, I know. Maybe. I don’t know what’s going on now. But everyone in my family is a doctor. So I used to like, you know, as a kid.
Speaker 1 | 30:20.133
Oh,
Speaker 0 | 30:20.253
wow. My dad had this, my dad had like a, a 42 foot, no, 38 foot Viking with like two twin diesel engines in it. Like this is a boat, right? Sport, sport fishing boat, right? Out of Kennebunkport, Maine. And actually all the pictures you’ve seen taken of George Bush fishing ever were all taken from my dad’s boat. But he was, yeah, yeah. So he was, uh, he was, uh. a doctor, he was like the doctor from like, almost like stereotypical out of caddy shack, almost, you know, like worked, you know, golf on Wednesday and Friday, you know, and take a couple months off in the summertime and be a captain. And, you know, he had his captain’s license, so he would do sport fishing. And, but I just remember as a kid, like, you know, the pharmaceutical reps would rent my dad’s boat to talk to him.
Speaker 1 | 31:12.022
Oh, really?
Speaker 0 | 31:12.582
Yeah, you know what he said? Like all these pharmaceutical reps would come on. My dad would be like taking them out and stuff. And here I am like a little kid in sixth grade or whatever, like not really knowing. I’m just like, you know, first mate or something. And there’s pharmaceutical reps on the boat. And I remember my dad one day like, oh, they shut that down. They can’t do that anymore. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1 | 31:30.147
he was making out on both ends.
Speaker 0 | 31:33.808
Yeah, I know. It’s just somewhat crazy. Yeah, that’s just the reality. Yes, I’m nothing like that, by the way.
Speaker 1 | 31:44.243
No.
Speaker 0 | 31:45.543
I learned, Dad. Thanks, Dad.
Speaker 1 | 31:46.844
I can see things.
Speaker 0 | 31:49.905
Oh, no, I love boats. Don’t get me wrong. And I’ll go. I like water skiing, too. I’ve just done a lot of fishing. Anywho, we don’t need to get into my, we’ll bring my shrink on. Does your shrink have an opening? Yeah. Okay. I’m going to do. where everything’s done via zoom now how oh good question so did covet affect does that affect or that affect you guys at all or i mean it definitely it definitely it definitely did and i think um one of the things is that we we wore masks in the office and they they staggered yeah uh they did
Speaker 1 | 32:25.821
i mean we did a really good job and again the boss the leadership they they um were understanding and again we it did run its course through the through the uh you through the organization we had people that were out i never got it surprisingly both my guys did um but it did it did run through and um but they had a really good plan in play and it there were no big hiccups when it did go through i mean i think honestly the snow storm that happened in texas hit us harder than than than the sun did yeah but we get a lot of product out of south south texas and when they had that snowstorm it definitely it made for an uncomfortable few months.
Speaker 0 | 33:07.872
As far as just delays and stuff. How’s that picked up? How’s that in general? How does IT affect production in your organization? Are you guys involved much in production or other?
Speaker 1 | 33:19.758
All the systems, yeah, all the systems run on our network. So we have giant reactors that have, you know, they utilize software to make sure that the chemicals are mixed properly. um dosages are headed to correct and they track the stuff so we’re a pretty big part of it um but again it’s with it’s software centric but um you know the systems are well put together so that we have you know we monitor them and we’re called sometimes but for the most part uh they’re not too hard but again when something does happen you know again it’s right back up to that worry monitor it goes right through the roof yes yes the
Speaker 0 | 34:03.862
Let me ask you this. When you were just getting started in IT, what was one of the biggest problems, frustrations, or concerns that you had that you were dealing with? And how did you overcome that?
Speaker 1 | 34:25.708
I think one of the things is speed. You know, when we were coming in, T1s. were the big, you know, if you had a T1, wow, you know, it was like a think of it network back then. The T1, you know, getting telephony and, you know, just internet in the building, the internet became kind of an important factor in the way we did business. And again, security wasn’t a big thing then. We never, you know, you’re probably worried about security when you did it with a virus. And then, you know, everybody and their brother had a virus protection software, but I guess that, you know, major system. extraordinarily slow and really didn’t work very well. That was the thing, people complaining about my network’s too slow and I can’t get my emails and blah, blah, blah. So I mean, that was the thing. And again, not much has changed. People are still complaining about how fast things are, but that was the big thing. And again, you were kind of painted into what kind of technology you could use. I mean, Dell was big, Gateway was big. What do you think of the business we’ve seen? So. You know, you either had a Dell or you had a Gateway. And learning how things ran. I remember, I don’t know if you can, the DEC alpha and those things is, you know, you had issues with, you know, the DEC alpha is what the chips called it. Nothing ran on them. But RISC, the RISC application, you know, so you can buy a RISC computer and nothing that you had on your desktop or your other service worked on the RISC. And we just, you know. Again, it was new, so everything that you did was the first time it was being done. So that was a big thing. The security was another thing. I mean, when I tell people that the internet wasn’t invented for the thing that we’re using for today, you know, people are like, what do you mean? I’m like, no, it was made for people to communicate from the government organizations to colleges. You know, it was point to point, so nobody had it with security. The way we’re utilizing it now, security was an issue. That became an issue. It was. later in the 90s and the 2000s.
Speaker 0 | 36:30.252
Yeah. It’s so amazing that you used to have a global address book on Hotmail.
Speaker 1 | 36:37.398
I know, right?
Speaker 0 | 36:38.679
You could look someone’s address up. You could look it up. Can you imagine that, a global email address book right now?
Speaker 1 | 36:46.846
I know. It would be insane. Well, if you think about it, I mean, we thought that I think the TSPV version 4 would be done by… We thought we’d be well into utilizing six. And I mean, I don’t know anybody that utilizes six strictly. I mean, we’re still on, you know, you know, so that’s, that’s the odd thing for me. I think Cedar kind of fixed that, but, but that was the thing we all, that was another thing. Like, Hey man, you’re running out of addresses. There won’t be addresses soon. Everybody was like, Oh my God, what will happen? It’ll be the end of the world if we don’t have the address.
Speaker 0 | 37:19.120
Yeah. Six years ago, I remember like, just like, yeah, I need a C block. No. The T1 thing is, yeah, that business that I was telling you about where I left and it was like the army and there was no HR, there was an HR department. It was really for exit interviews. Yeah, that was selling T1s. Yeah, it was a Cisco startup selling T1s with like a Cisco IAD on it when, you know, SIP trunking was first like on the scene and we were like, you know. Well, we can deliver you analog, a PRI, or SIP. It’s really all SIP, but it was just conversion. There was no, we’re just converting. I remember when we went to SIP Trumps, that Cisco was telling him, saying, hey,
Speaker 1 | 38:00.991
you know that SIP Trumps aren’t that secure, and you’ll probably want a PRI converter. You know? Anything that’s selling.
Speaker 0 | 38:14.195
Anything that’s in the power cell. But I was like, dude, this is a T1. I mean, we can bond these. We can give you three.
Speaker 1 | 38:24.859
Three megs
Speaker 0 | 38:26.720
And then I remember we got I used to get so frustrated Then Comcast came in and like some dude That was at his house and he was like Dude I got eight megs at my house what are you talking about Like you know I can watch a movie after about four hours of downloading it Like what You know pulling out our blackberries Like you know
Speaker 1 | 38:47.098
A good friend of mine He was my boss when I was with I worked with Jocelyn And he was my boss there. And he had a BlackBerry. He still has a BlackBerry today. I don’t know how it’s working. I don’t know where he’s getting it from. But he still carries a BlackBerry.
Speaker 0 | 39:01.133
I loved that phone so much. I love that.
Speaker 1 | 39:04.676
BlackBerry Pearl.
Speaker 0 | 39:05.777
Yeah, just the messaging, the whole Bez server thing and the messaging. And then some kid on my team, way younger than me, had the first iPhone. And he was like, Phil, this is so much better. And I remember getting so angry at him. Like, no, no. It’s not better. I was so angry. He’s like, no, but look. He’s like, look at what this thing could do. It’s crazy. I was like, what do you mean one button? I’m losing my mind watching this thing because at the time, Blackberry was a big part of our life. like portfolio at the time. And like, you know, iPhone was like exclusively through AT&T. Remember you only 18, you could only get it through AT&T. Remember? Um, anyway, so I just remember that was like, I was like, this is going to kill us. It killed.
Speaker 1 | 39:52.134
I remember you had to set up its own server in the network for your, I mean, one of the things we, in order to get email, we had to set up a server in our, behind our firewall so we can get BlackBerrys to work.
Speaker 0 | 40:03.304
Yeah. The BlackBerry exchange server, man. But that, instant messaging and everything that was just that was just a new thing like messaging back and forth instantly instant messaging now we’re like people people are gonna listen to this me like what i don’t what do you mean i don’t get it like even my uh like even yeah like my nephews and nieces and stuff my kids geez my kids they don’t they never grew up in a time without internet i just it’s still i talk about it probably every other show every other show but just still blows my mind right like you know like 1985 I mean, I’ve had people say, like, one of my daughter’s friends was like, what are we living in the 1980s? I was like, I’m old now.
Speaker 1 | 40:48.931
My kids don’t know what it’s like not to have a cell phone.
Speaker 0 | 40:52.253
Yeah, it’s crazy.
Speaker 1 | 40:54.514
Well, my kids have never seen a cassette before.
Speaker 0 | 40:57.135
Yeah, that’s wild. That is wild. Let alone an LP.
Speaker 1 | 41:00.556
My daughter knows what records are because they’re making a comeback.
Speaker 0 | 41:03.818
Yeah, because it’s like cool. Yeah, just records, just because it’s like a, yeah. Just because it’s a record.
Speaker 1 | 41:10.739
I’m going to be totally honest with you. I’m going to be totally honest with you. If you want to listen to records, you can say, oh man, I’m an audiophile. I like listening to records. You mean you like listening to music sounding like garbage. Because a record has record sound on it. It doesn’t sound great. It’s got a, it’s grunty. You know, I don’t care what you say. You know, digital sound is mastered. It’s amazing. You know, when we do a record. You go to a record,
Speaker 0 | 41:39.448
you’re like, wow, you would go watch a Super 8 movie, you know? I don’t know how you don’t get it. Well, you got 8-track, too. I remember 8-tracks. I just wanted to, I just want, I saw these 8-tracks, like, sitting in, like, a cardboard box in the attic as a kid growing up or something. And I was just like.
Speaker 1 | 41:50.212
That’s where they’re all at now.
Speaker 0 | 41:52.173
I don’t know. Yeah, someone’s got to put one in a car and just plug that thing, just to freak someone out.
Speaker 1 | 41:58.176
And it’s got to be Super Tramp’s Breakfast in America.
Speaker 0 | 42:03.398
Um, the, okay. So now, okay. So, so fast forward, it was speed back then. It was T ones. We’ll get you. It’s 45 days. Last mile. We’re still dealing with that. Some, some. Oh,
Speaker 1 | 42:18.949
last mile is a big, yeah. I don’t even use that term any, I mean, I haven’t used that term in a while, but yeah, the last mile is the one that, you know,
Speaker 0 | 42:29.116
that was the telephone company telling you it’s your fault. Yeah. Well, it was. finger pointing. It still goes on. It’s the IT guy. No, it’s the last mile provider. No, it’s the network provider. What’s your single lack? What is your single biggest problem, frustration, or concern now?
Speaker 1 | 42:50.169
It’s security. In all honesty, it’s ransomware. Ransomware is we’ve had vendors of ours got hit with ransomware we’ve actually had customers get ransomware um so that’s a big thing i worry about you know we we put a lot of stuff into play about about ransomware um you know and again we the system we we throw and sit on 600 we set out 600 meg you know out to the world and we don’t mean we don’t even use that i think we use that we’re at 35 to 40 percent of that so it is never an issue but again the faster you can get out the faster they can get in so security and uh That’s a good point.
Speaker 0 | 43:30.643
That’s a good point. Just go back to the T1s. No one will want to hack you. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 43:34.345
no one will.
Speaker 0 | 43:36.586
They will not touch you. I had an organization and I went in and it was the easiest rebuild. It was like, sometimes you go in and it’s just like the easiest fix ever. So it was 140 users on a fractional T1. And no, like, it was like pop email and like… It was just like, I can’t even begin to describe how, you know, it was like, well, let’s, the first thing we’re going to do is, you know, and you go, this was a consulting thing I did, like, I don’t know, four or five years ago. And I remember going through like, you know, the questionnaire, like I have like a, I have like some general questions you ask everyone, right? Like, you know, like what’s your security policy, security stance, like, you know, some different, like currently, right? Like where you stand right now, what do you love? What do you hate about things? How do you, you know, all this different stuff. And. When I got to the security stuff, the outsourced kind of like IT MSP kind of just like stared at me and he’s like, what do you mean? He’s like, we have a T1. Who wants to hack us? He was like, that’s our security. Or like you know Even if someone tried to take something It would take them forever But it was Bad there was like open servers With fans pointing at them Yeah Literally open It was If you’d call it that it was more like the maintenance It was more like the shared maintenance room Yeah You know what that’s a big thing too
Speaker 1 | 45:10.961
You’ll have I want to say They think that you can throw a server anywhere. You know, the last place I worked, there was actually a water line.
Speaker 0 | 45:20.223
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 45:20.363
of course. A water line that went right over this server.
Speaker 0 | 45:23.144
Yeah, yeah, a sprinkler system. Yeah, a sprinkler system. Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 45:27.005
Well, this wasn’t even, this was plumbing. It wasn’t even a sprinkler system. It was plumbing. I was like, you know, if something happens, that’s going to throw out this equipment here, right? Nothing’s going to happen.
Speaker 0 | 45:40.209
It’ll be fine. That’s a risk we’re willing to take. Okay, so I had a, so you got ransomware, we got the security piece. You mentioned vendors. Oh, I know what it was. I’ve realized recently that one of the biggest weaknesses to some organizations are the vendor security. And because. I’ve had vendors, basically what I had was I had a situation where you had a big organization with an MSP serving certain areas of that organization. They were doing certain things for that organization, not everything. Just like, you know, like some, I don’t know, maybe some database stuff or something, you know, whatever. But that… A project came up for bid inside the company and that MSP wanted the project so bad that they shared basically the internal network map, all the IP schemes and everything with all the vendors across the board right away. I would assume there was an NDA in place and things like that, but I came upon their entire network map, IP scheme, everything. With, and I, and without any knowledge of them, without the IT manager knowing how, so I basically went to the IT manager, I was like, hey, I was like, do you know what, that I have this? And he was like, no, thank you very much.
Speaker 1 | 47:20.420
Really? Yeah. That’s insane.
Speaker 0 | 47:23.201
So the point is money is a very tempting thing to people and the vendors. that we deal with often are their primary goal is to sell and to make a profit and to grow their company and to sell that company. That’s their primary. Their goal is the same goal as your company is to make a profit and to make money, right? And a lot of times we trust… uh, we trust our vendors because they come in and they shine up well and they show Gartner magic quadrant and Frost and Sullivan and blah, blah, blah. And we’re, we’re a partner and we’re going to be a partner and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And then, you know, then you get off the team’s call or zoom call and they’re sharing your network map with everyone.
Speaker 1 | 48:11.755
Yeah. Well, again, yeah. A favorite nation, um, um, vendors is one of the things that you know, once I get to a vendor that I really like, and I’ve worked with for years, I try to take them wherever I go. That’s, that’s a big thing, but you’re, I’ve dealt with, um, in fact, one of the vendors here that we worked with early on, um, they, you know, my boss was on the phone with them and they’re like, Hey, you know what you can do? You get rid of your whole IT team. And we will support you.
Speaker 0 | 48:39.468
Yeah. Classic.
Speaker 1 | 48:42.390
And my boss is telling me this. I’m like, wow, guess who’s not getting a renewed contract.
Speaker 0 | 48:49.974
Amazing. Well,
Speaker 1 | 48:51.415
and how can you trust somebody that would do that?
Speaker 0 | 48:55.558
It’s, I would say 80% of the, it’s the classic 80-20 rule.
Speaker 1 | 49:00.401
It’s the classic 80-20 rule. No, you’re right. Yeah. In all honesty, companies, regardless of their size, you have to have an IT team or an internal IT person or IT team. Yeah. And I have to get off this one. I can already hear you.
Speaker 0 | 49:17.533
Go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 49:18.786
You have to have internal IP, you have to have someone that you can trust, and it’s going to be on call, it’s going to handle your, it’s going to be comfortable with your end users. Yeah. And I don’t think that a, you know, a managed service provider can do that. I think they’re good for something. Just like you said, I mean, ordering equipment or getting some, some auxiliary.
Speaker 0 | 49:39.132
They can’t be completely, they can’t have complete ownership in the company and completely in alignment with the vision. Eric, Ben, Ben, an absolute pleasure having you on the show. If you had any one piece of information to send out to the other people listening or anything like that, what would it be? Thank you. Sounds great.
Speaker 1 | 49:58.063
Yeah. No, it was fantastic talking to you. I mean, this is awesome. And I can’t wait to, I’m going to listen to some of your shows, but this has been fantastic. One of the things is, is try to minimize stress, you know, try to put stuff in the way that the bad guy can’t get into your system and, you know, treat everybody well.
Speaker 0 | 50:18.409
Thank you, sir. Thank you.
