Speaker 0 | 00:09.622
Welcome to another podcast of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we’ve got Matt Dawson, who is the Senior Director of IT. Hey, Matt, would you like to tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do and where you work?
Speaker 1 | 00:25.026
Sure, Mike. Thanks for having me on, first of all. a little bit about myself i’ve been in i.t for about three decades now um living here in north texas for about 20 of those three decades for about 20 years and uh i’m a senior director like you said a biopharma company here in the dallas area i’ve
Speaker 0 | 00:46.159
been it for a number of years now and uh it’s always interesting yeah you know i saw that biopharma and i wondered a little about that would you tell me what that’s like? How’s that different than what everybody thinks of just as the regular tech and director of IT? What does that bring to your world that I probably don’t see in transportation?
Speaker 1 | 01:12.579
Yeah, it’s a good question. It is way different. You know, I started back in IT back a long time ago. Never would have thought I’d be in the place I am right now. But in biopharma, it’s biological pharmaceuticals. So they do actually have some places where they test and have big hazard signs up. But it’s a little different than my past experience because in this job, we actually have manufacturing distribution as well as the regular IT. When I say regular, you know, typical office stuff. We also deal with government entities and things of that nature. So there’s a thing like serialization of the product, which is a numbering processing thing that we have to do to track it from the time it’s manufactured to the time it’s delivered. And then all the regulations that go around it. So it’s different. It makes it interesting because there’s no real good.
Speaker 0 | 01:57.260
blue book so to speak of what needs to be done how to do it okay you know i always kind of wondered and one of the other things that i read was that you have to deal with a lot of compliance sounded like um or i saw socks and uh hipaa and fda and dea but before we even get into that one i i kind of wondered what about um some of the tv i watch too much tv and i and i
Speaker 1 | 02:25.392
get trapped into these things and i think that there’s a lot of a um corporate espionage going on have you uh have you had to deal with anything like that yeah you know it’s funny uh tv’s right sometimes i think corporate espionage and sometimes it’s not even planned espionage you know what i’m saying um so you know cyber security i was telling me you know 90 of it is the end user and other than user it’s always the guy that leaves his laptop on a plane or loans it to somebody you know why you would do that i don’t know but you know sales guys and executives have a different mindset their jobs to grow a business and sell stuff fast so yeah that that um it’s funny we we do actually have a problem with that in our industry because of what we do you do have the astronauts where people try to come in and try to get in the system either remotely or by uh hacking into somebody’s system or by actually coming on site and trying to get into the wi-fi like sitting in a parking lot so it makes a little interesting so we have cameras outside and stop people even if they’re in the parking lot and see what they’re doing so it’s kind of a different uh different beast yeah go ahead oh no i said like you said it’s just it’s something it’s kind of funny because you do see it on tv and my uh my
Speaker 0 | 03:38.569
wife watches all those shows you know yeah yeah yeah like one of the things that we did you know i started trying to wrap my head around how we were going to make um guest Wi-Fi usable and all of the fun around that. And then suddenly, you know, I finally realized I could hit the simple button and just create a guest network and keep it completely separate from the internal network. So that if somebody was out in the parking lot, that they couldn’t access any of the internal stuff. Instead of trying to layer all of the firewalls and the rules and making sure somebody hit that save button or that. write command before we rebooted the router so that we lost all of those modifications. I’m sure nothing like that’s ever happened to you.
Speaker 1 | 04:30.510
Oh, no. Yeah. I’ve never forgotten to write to mem and rebooted. And I had to start all over. No one’s ever done that, right, Mike? I guess something new. IT guys, I think, you know, historically, we’ve all done it at least once, if not multiple times. You put your face palm, right, put your head. pondered for it. Oh my god, I gotta do this all over again.
Speaker 0 | 04:53.166
Yeah, or my favorite one is when I reboot a device like that when I’m remoted into it and waiting for it to come back up and then I realize, oh wait a minute, I just rebooted it. I can’t get back to it.
Speaker 1 | 05:05.581
Yeah. IP change or something crazy. We have four different wireless networks, so it can be confusing. So you’re real careful what you’re doing. Make sure you don’t turn the wrong thing on and off. All right.
Speaker 0 | 05:19.670
So tell me a little more about your history. You got 30 years in the industry. So that means to me, let’s see, it’s 23, somewhere around 90, 93. It was a different world back then. It was complete. completely different world. So talk to me about what you were doing when you first came into the IT and technology.
Speaker 1 | 05:42.143
Yeah, actually, I hate to say it was actually before 90. It was way different. Yeah, it was way different. So I actually went to school for mechanical engineering. And I landed a job and we were working on a big project for the government. And I had taken some programming back in the old, if you remember the old Prime OS, the Vax VMS systems back in the day, and they did all their CAD work on there. So they brought in some of the old Apple IIs there to do documentation on, but nobody knew how to use them. And I did. So that’s literally how I got into IT. They said, hey, if you can do this, can you do this on the mainframe? And yeah, actually I can. And, uh… I started doing IT, so I went right literally from designing exciting stuff like stairs, and you get into doing rendering, which is a huge take all night back then. So you’d start the process and it would run eight to 10 hours, maybe 12, depending on what the drawing was, to render it so you could look at it and how cool it looked. And if it messed up, you just start all over again. I do it now on my phone, right? I pick a button and…
Speaker 0 | 06:59.336
Right, and now you just pick the stairs and you throw the item down and you’ve got a visualization of it and you just pinch or zoom to change the size. And back then, we’re talking monochrome monitors. We’re talking to actually render it and draw the pictures. Well, we’re still talking about the times when 16 megs of RAM was a huge amount of RAM.
Speaker 1 | 07:26.526
Oh, it’s crazy. I remember soldering those back in the… 90s, I got soldering memory on the board. Instead of just putting the dimming stuff in, you do now the SIMs. And yeah, 16 gigs is unheard of. I don’t know what you’d ever need it for. It’s like I’ve got 100 megs of my hard drive and two to four gigs of memory. I mean, I’m sad.
Speaker 0 | 07:49.917
All right, so you went from the Apple IIs to the mainframes, doing some CAD work too.
Speaker 1 | 07:58.836
I started programming back in the day and I actually did that for a number of years and got hired by an engineering firm to help them rewrite a program. And it was a facilities management program that would do square foot calculations and put in the old DB4 database and did it until AutoCAD actually bought the program from the company. And typical law. software fashion they bought it and they trashed it um it was a lot of fun that’s why i quit developing i think there’s no glory in this so i actually quit i got into infrastructure and it um because there wasn’t a lot of it you know dell their sales guys used to bring the system in and they fixed it but if your sales guy was on the other side of the state yeah it was hard to get back around again so i started doing the hardware side of it and doing infrastructure and
Speaker 0 | 08:57.448
going to want to do today so yeah so talk about infrastructure then because i think infrastructure today and infrastructure then are radically different because now we’ve got um infrastructure as a service um versus what what you’re talking about which is like the i’m assuming total wiring the true data centers hopefully true data centers instead of a data center in a closet like i had to battle with um you know so so Enlighten some of the youngins that are listening to us about infrastructure back in the, what time frame are we hitting now? 95?
Speaker 1 | 09:37.422
Yeah, about mid-90s, yeah. We had the big old, we had the AS400 back, oh, I guess it was the, yeah, the AS400 back then, and the raised floor. That’s what those mean. Do you really? Yeah. I’m still certified. I still get calls from people going, can you still do this? I said, well, if you want to pay me. We had the raised floor back then, so we had the AS400, we had the… the solaris systems and some of those kind of things the hpu x And we used to call it racking and stacking, just get the big old rack in there, run all the wiring under the floor, the big air handling units that ran so you couldn’t even hear yourself talk, depending on where you were in the data center. And it was a far different cry than today because the equipment was big and heavy, and you’d put the server in and have to put different parts in because it was too heavy to lift. I look at some of the stuff today, and it’s just amazing how you can get one you and have… Literally as much horsepower, processing power as a whole rack used to have.
Speaker 0 | 10:38.094
Yeah, it is amazing the amount of power that we have in today’s racks. You know, that’s hundreds of servers with so much more power and so much more processing speed and redundancy and everything else compared to what we had back in the mid-90s. So tell me more. Keep going.
Speaker 1 | 11:00.123
Yeah, no, I’ll show you. Yeah, I’ve done. I remember, I guess a quick story when I was doing it, we were doing the IVR, the Interactive Voice Response System. It was literally three racks of servers that would process 96 lines and rotate them as people called. And I think there were two sets of 96 lines. And they would do all the calls, and so you would have to shut the lines down, literally one group by group to program because you couldn’t just make a change. you program it test it so you’d have one running you have to do it after hours um middle of the night because we had less calls uh in the data center call through and it was that tied into the customer service department and their systems they could see the calls and answer it was very convoluted system and uh it was a lot of work to keep up keeping we had people on 24 7 and staffing of the data center and uh they would let people in when needed to and
Speaker 0 | 11:59.440
have to keep track of the air conditioning and the power and actually go out and look at it you know each rack had a little um its own set of stuff that they would check as they went around the data center yeah and i want to remind our listeners because you know when you first started talking to me about 96 lines i’m thinking you know i my mind went back to the programming and i’m thinking 96 lines code no we’re talking 96 lines of pots lines folks yes um plain old telephone system Back when we had to do collect calling and actually dial up and things like that. Because this is still that era. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 12:35.603
yeah. It’s the era of dial-ups. They just want their own separate number. Yeah, all the plot slides. You plug them in, and if one went, you had to check everything from the board to the line itself and trace it back. There’s a telephone line. It’s something people probably don’t even know what that is.
Speaker 0 | 12:51.911
Yeah, I was going to explain that. You know, I’m sure that there’s more than a couple of people out there that don’t understand what POTS lines are. And they’re thinking of something else that a couple of states legalized. Yeah. No, that POTS in this case stands for plain old telephone system.
Speaker 1 | 13:09.498
Yeah, it’s POTS. We were real creative back then. Well,
Speaker 0 | 13:12.939
because we had to shorten it. We had to make it real quick and easy to say, you know, POTS lines. And I remember how much fun it was bringing in. Hots lines and then the, oh man, I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with them anymore. But what are the telephone lines where we’d get 23 channels and then one channel for information? It was like 24 lines total.
Speaker 1 | 13:40.370
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got them too. I did. It’s been forever.
Speaker 0 | 13:48.473
Aren’t you glad that we don’t remember what they are?
Speaker 1 | 13:51.535
It was terrible. It was terrible. You know. But, you know, funny, Mike, I recently just got fiber running into my house.
Speaker 0 | 14:00.361
Oh, man, I’m jealous.
Speaker 1 | 14:02.563
It’s so nice. I’ve got more speed here than I do in my office. But it amazed me because I remember having DSL when it first came out in my house. It took two months for them to start putting it in the neighborhood, and they finally got the DSL. I thought that was so fast.
Speaker 0 | 14:19.937
It was. And it was constant. You didn’t have to. deal with the dial-up. You didn’t have people picking up the phone and going, oh, and listening to the screeching of the lines. Yeah, when it first came out, we had to put those filters on the phone lines so that the phone calls wouldn’t interact or wouldn’t interfere with the DSL. That only lasted a few years.
Speaker 1 | 14:45.688
Yeah, it was, I actually worked back towards the end of the 90s, or I guess it was 2000. Yeah. for a company and they did return pass satellite. And so you would dial out through the modem and it would download through the satellite. It was screaming. I think that thing was a Meg, like a T1 speed.
Speaker 0 | 15:11.575
Yeah. Get them down. Well, T1s were only 1.5 Meg. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 15:14.876
that is T1 speed. It was a piece called the Tachyon. I’m trying to be funny, but it was just a big ugly dish. Not that reliable.
Speaker 0 | 15:25.740
Yeah. Oh, man. You guys don’t realize what it was like back then when a T1 was like the fast speeds for a… business and it’s a 1.5 megabit connection and right now I’ve got people trying to bring me fiber to our corporate offices and we could have anywhere from
Speaker 1 | 15:45.569
500 megs to gigabit speeds yeah um you know we just put in um another 100 megs in my office as we had 500 went to another 100 with a separate less redundant line right within there putting it in i thought wow that just seemed like so fast and then i got a gig at my house and i go actually my house is faster now um which is unheard of back in the day i started with the dot the dot bomb error um when i had the satellite dish it was uh i was the fastest connection in the neighborhood and that’s what we did you know the brief old stint with the uh dot-com error and uh and i seem really fast you know like you said do you have any kids at that point i do i i had my oldest son was in school and we had the um yeah and we had a computer in the living room and wanting to talk with all ferret and uh that’s when he started doing that he would surf i guess and his friends would get on and do um the chatting deal with the i am so the bulletin boards was what what i remember yeah the bbs yeah you know bbs that’s what like reddit reminds me today of like the bullet boards with more features but yeah and then that reminds me of like mozilla and when the
Speaker 0 | 17:14.703
world wide web just really started to come out um late later part of the 90s and we were like mozilla was Nobody knew the URLs and DNS wasn’t as established as it is. So we had that Mozilla spinner or what was it? I can’t even remember the name of the feature, but you could just push a button and it would randomly pick one of the hundreds of websites that were out there and just bring it to you. So you could just start exploring what people had put out on the World Wide Web. Remember those?
Speaker 1 | 17:51.219
Yeah, the old terrible. websites too if you look back when you’re looking at it I don’t know I just hit the button and it showed up so we’re looking at it it’s Russian but it’s nice the flash tags yeah
Speaker 0 | 18:07.808
look at this flash ooh GIFs
Speaker 1 | 18:11.070
GIFs have motion yeah the motion I remember this 2001 2002 the CEO saw one of my programs that worked for me, so I was the director, wrote a program, and he thought it was on the web. He just thought it was a cool thing. He wanted to show it on the show. And it was actually on the computer because it was too much flash and stuff going on to put it on the web. So it would take forever to come up on a dial-up. But it looked really neat, so he wanted to put it on the show. He said, we’re going to take this to CEF. I was like, we can’t do that. They’re going to know. Sorry, off the bat, this isn’t coming from the internet.
Speaker 0 | 18:52.828
Wow, so you were in the dot-com part where going to CES at that point?
Speaker 1 | 18:59.391
Yeah, CES, Interop was a big one. There was a couple others.
Speaker 0 | 19:08.296
Did you ever watch Catch Fire or Catching Fire or what was the TV show? And they were doing some of the Interop and those kinds of things with the original PCs that people were building in the garages.
Speaker 1 | 19:23.136
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 19:24.217
Alton Catchfire, that’s it.
Speaker 1 | 19:25.918
Yeah, yeah. That was great. You know, it’s funny. Remember they said the catalogs back in the day and you could buy computer parts and build your own computer. The computer shopper was a big… I found one looking through my old stuff. My son was like, well, why wouldn’t you just go online? Because you couldn’t. That’s not how it works, son. It’s like a serial robot for computer people.
Speaker 0 | 19:50.240
Yeah, the only people online were DARPA.
Speaker 1 | 19:53.784
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, it was great. So, yeah, the dot-bomb era, we call it, but Interop and all the different shows. I spent a lot of time in Vegas. I don’t even gamble. But it was kind of neat because you got to see. I got to see the launch of XM radio and the, uh, what’s the, the Abio, the robot dog would run for like 10, 15 minutes. That would run a battery and have to wait three hours to do it again. Um,
Speaker 0 | 20:23.554
come back at six o’clock.
Speaker 1 | 20:24.975
That’s feeding. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. It’s kind of funny how things have changed. Um, yeah, but, uh, it’s a good old day. So no one goes to Vegas anymore. Do that for any defense.
Speaker 0 | 20:38.060
They do. They do. Now it’s things like the, what are the,
Speaker 1 | 20:43.002
the
Speaker 0 | 20:44.062
Blue Men and, but there’s still other shows. I mean, CES is still a thing and people are still going to that and checking it out and all the new technology. Although now it’s all of the virtual and the AI and the ML. So all acronyms that most people listening to this podcast should know.
Speaker 1 | 21:03.970
Yeah, you’d hope, right.
Speaker 0 | 21:05.731
Compared to the hotlines.
Speaker 1 | 21:07.968
Yeah, the old POTS lines, yeah. And it reminds me when I talk about the POTS lines is we just went to a VoIP system that’s hosted in the cloud. And, you know, we were doing it. I thought back in the old days we had to plug all that stuff in and get everything running. And if you wanted to move a phone system, it was a year-long process to take everything down, put a new system in. And we actually just swung over to… Well… new phone system and it was pretty easy. They swung the lines over and rolled up everything in the cloud and we put wave clones in the office and connected them to the internet.
Speaker 0 | 21:47.961
We’ve actually been doing that for around eight years now and it was a game changer. It sure made life a lot easier. Got rid of all of the now I can’t even think of those types of lines, but the the It bugs me that I can’t remember. Now all I have is direct internet connections, DIA connections. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 22:11.957
the DIDs.
Speaker 0 | 22:14.038
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 22:14.798
All the DIDs.
Speaker 0 | 22:16.459
Yeah, we’ve got the DIDs so that you’ve got the direct inward dialed so you can reach somebody’s desk. But then, you know, call centers and it’s all around bandwidth. I remember we started with doing VoIP, Cisco VoIP, back in 2002. And trying to have the MPLS and the redundancy and the bandwidth and all of the different things that required. Oh, that was a frustrating setup. And trying to have disaster recovery. I did notice some disaster recovery in your resume. So, you know, keep moving forward. It’s 2000s and now you’re like the Director of Technical Services.
Speaker 1 | 23:02.092
data center where were you doing telecom pos support did telecom we were in the whole day so we did uh telecom support and we also did uh end user support for uh for our location um about that time i worked for um actually rent a center a big rent to own and they were pretty big at the time um about two or three thousand locations we were all over the country so we had actually uh did a lot with mpls back then for our internet activity preaching sites bringing it all back in into our data center because we ran everything out of there. I think we had just the big 6,500. I think we had like eight of them.
Speaker 0 | 23:43.553
But thousands of locations? Literally thousands? Yeah. I cannot fathom dealing with a network like that, especially back then.
Speaker 1 | 23:53.937
I had a pretty big staff and a lot of smart people. It wasn’t just me, but, you know, we… I still call it whiteboard, and I could put in a short draw and stuff, because one little issue, you’d have to check everything, because it could become a big issue, because if it started, you know, one little place in nowhere, Maine, it could actually balloon into half of New York State or Texas being down, which is a big deal. And so a lot of monitoring. Yeah, it was a big network. There was a lot. We had, you know, literally had people from Verizon at the time that we were doing our vendor. They would actually come on site every week, go through the billing, as well as the reports and the logs. And they had people monitoring it along with us so we could get stuff before it actually started falling down.
Speaker 0 | 24:40.737
So we’ve now entered into the true era of most everybody in business having a cell phone. What was your first cell phone? Or were you one of the ones that got one of the car phones?
Speaker 1 | 24:53.802
I did. I had the car phone, the old bag phone. Went in the trunk of my car and hooked up into my car. But you could carry it if you had to go someplace, in case I had to change cars. And I had the bag phone and I had the Blackberry one. It was just a pager. Okay. But the same size as a regular Blackbird, but it was a big pager. And then I get rid of both of those. My company bought me a, remember those Skytel two-way pager? Yeah. I had that for a little while. That was really cool and didn’t have a phone. And then I had the brick phone, the old Motorola. I think everybody had that big square Motorola phone.
Speaker 0 | 25:28.764
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 25:28.904
I remember those things.
Speaker 0 | 25:30.004
Yeah. You can just see the shape of it with that big old, now you kind of associate it to the satellite phones, but that big old thick antenna.
Speaker 1 | 25:40.809
Yeah, I think the coolest one I ever had was when the StarTech came out. You know, they finally got a cool phone.
Speaker 0 | 25:47.852
Man, Motorola StarTech. Now I remember that one. It was kind of one of the first clamshells, I think.
Speaker 1 | 25:55.495
Yeah, at the time it was pretty sleek. It was pretty sleek. It’s kind of funny. Some of the new phones remind me of some of those old flip phones back in the day. They’re getting popular again.
Speaker 0 | 26:08.916
It’s weird how we go backwards.
Speaker 1 | 26:10.958
Right? Return from whence you came. And I still have my trio. I think everybody had a trio at one point, right? You know, keyboard and software. These two are all blank now. We get to email on our phones. It was on.
Speaker 0 | 26:30.930
Oh, yeah, the Palm Trio. Oh, man.
Speaker 1 | 26:33.172
Yeah, the Palm Trio, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 26:35.113
And, yeah. I remember trying to keep that stuff alive into, like, 2010. That software for those people who just would not let it go.
Speaker 1 | 26:46.939
I had my Trio, yeah. I had a boss who was like that. He said, yeah, you can get one of those. If you’re new to PDA and then smartphones came out, I thought I’d get down to one of those. He still had the Trio. We finally got them off of a blackboard. and like two years later
Speaker 0 | 27:01.187
Blackberry started going away and he didn’t kill me we moved into an iPhone now he has you know he always knew whenever yours yeah my family’s giving me a hard time about the cell phone how often I switch cell phones like right now I’m I’m rocking one that’s a little over a year old and and they’re like looking at me going wait a minute what’s wrong dad why haven’t you gotten a new one
Speaker 1 | 27:28.670
Yeah, mine was like a year and a half, almost two years old. I just actually finally broke down and bought a new one because my battery was dying.
Speaker 0 | 27:37.053
I can’t believe how expensive they are now, and then there’s no funding from the mobile providers or the cellular providers.
Speaker 1 | 27:47.177
Yeah, you used to get the phone with the deal, right? You’d say, I’ll sign up for a year or two years, and they’d give you a phone.
Speaker 0 | 27:53.100
Yeah, not anymore.
Speaker 1 | 27:54.200
You’d give it back to them. Yeah, not anymore. It’s crazy. but they do a lot more now so you i know that we you know we run you know office 365 and um one drive and share file and all that on the phone now so when we travel they pretty much have all the access everything they need on their phones to kind of change the way we do our business and our security as well so it creates a whole new issue with that stuff so yeah that definitely
Speaker 0 | 28:24.686
made a huge change to the way that we’re doing business. It made it a little easier when COVID hit us in 2020, but it also, I’m sure you had some other challenges because let’s see, 2020, where were you at? You were with the current people, right? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 28:44.614
Yeah, the biofarm,
Speaker 0 | 28:46.775
yeah. 2018, so go ahead, talk to me. Let’s jump forward to that. Let’s talk about what it was like when… When all of that started coming out, how quickly did you have to pivot or did you already have the infrastructure up?
Speaker 1 | 29:01.133
No, we had talked about it. So, you know, we do manufacturing. So the manufacturing had to change how they did theirs. So they went to shift work. So people couldn’t stand close together. But on the business side, we had to pivot pretty quick. We had talked about going virtual and doing some other things. And it was like a year-long process to do that. And the CFO came in and said. you know how fast you can do it i said well it took a couple of months he said i need it done in a couple of weeks um and we had just moved over to the the hosted voip system so that was easy but all the computers we had yeah we we had computers on site in the little data center i was like well i don’t know how this is gonna work but we had some of them virtualized so that made it a little easier um so we worked with a third party vendor and we virtualized everything and ran to the cloud and took just a couple of weeks and got everything up in the cloud and moved a lot of stuff to share file and that we could with our system that we had in place we had to modify a lot of stuff and train people and then the biggest issue was finding laptops and stuff for people to use
Speaker 0 | 30:10.457
One of the things that really surprised me about my people was I’m so used to it. And I just, you know, you got fiber at home. I don’t have fiber, but I’ve got the fastest network connection I can get out of any of the third or the providers that are in my neighborhood. And as we started sending people home to have people come up and say, I don’t have an Internet connection at home. It just flabbergasted me. I just couldn’t conceive of it. And I think it’s just because of the role that I’m in and the work that I do that, you know, I just assumed everybody had that. Did you guys run into any of that?
Speaker 1 | 30:50.147
Yeah, we did. And that was the thing we had a problem with. We kind of just thought it was, you know, like just a one-off. We had a lot of salespeople that were on the field. They were still, you know, still employed. But because they traveled, they didn’t have internet. like what do you mean how do you do your work and you go well you give me an ipad that has data connection i just use that like okay well then just keep using that and then of course they can’t uh can’t check their mail and all that stuff all the time you do spreadsheets on the ipads and then we had to change the plan and get them uh to use laptops and then buying laptops like that was hard but it’s amazing a lot of people had laptops but we had a group that did not have internet connection well how do you don’t you like watch movies or you know oh yeah i watched it i’ve had it watched on my phone like really oh i never thought of that you know a lot of um it’s surprising a lot of the younger people didn’t know the ones that didn’t have internet um i would say a lot i mean we had probably 10 20 that didn’t have it it amazed me yeah i was at a dumb time like you have no internet at home all of those cord cutters and it amazes me too you know i provide
Speaker 0 | 32:03.960
network connectivity at home and my kids are wandering around just staring at their phones versus that that 40 inch tv that’s hanging on the wall in their room and they’re not even streaming it from their phone to the tv they
Speaker 1 | 32:18.590
just leave the tv off yeah they watch their phones my sons i have two younger sons and the other in my 20s not to say younger but um they do that all the time they’ll watch a movie and you know see them finally you have a tv right and uh one just moved out and he has an apartment and he has a i gave one of my old tvs you know like 40 inch tv and uh he hasn’t turned it on he’s in the week yeah i was like oh that was good present i guess everybody
Speaker 0 | 32:48.588
watches his phone yeah i can’t yeah same here and you know i went over 50 so now i have to have the glasses especially i need to read anything yeah
Speaker 1 | 33:01.508
What’s nice about the iPhone, right? You can zoom the text in and out.
Speaker 0 | 33:05.790
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 33:06.170
for sure. In the old days, you’re kind of stuck with it. Now you can actually zoom it in and zoom out and look at it. Yeah, so back to Spur real quick, we had to virtualize everything pretty quick. We did VDIs then, the virtual desktop environment. We rolled it out, and a bunch of people would just use their iPad remote into the computer or use their own personal computer remote, and it literally changed the entire infrastructure for the company. And with that, all the security and all the other things that go with it.
Speaker 0 | 33:33.846
Yeah, we had virtualized a lot, had a lot of things up in the cloud. And one of the primary things that we had set up for ourselves is we had the terminal services set up and virtualized apps instead of just virtualized desktops. So we were, we really, what we did was we had users use their home computers, the ones that had them and the ones that had internet connections. We had them come through the, you know, Active Directory and the terminal servers and then sling into the corporate office. And then they could remote into their desktop. So it was still behind the firewalls and secure. They weren’t able to transfer files in and out, but from their home to work. But on their work computer, they had all of the access and all of the things that they were used to. It was just now through their screen at home. We ended up giving out, or not giving out, but lending out a whole bunch of monitors so that people could have dual monitors at home and tweaking the setups on the terminal services so that they could have that access or use multiple monitors on their home PC. It’s one of the ways that we got through it, but we didn’t have anywhere near the level of compliance and security that you had to have with the HIPAA and FDA and DEA.
Speaker 1 | 34:57.900
Yeah, that’s where some of our issues came into keeping stuff compliant. So we did the virtual desktop to make it easier. We did do terminal for the accounting team and they’re actually still remote to this day. uh they actually uh seem to be doing better than they were in the office uh but you know we had data scientists and we have scientists on staff that had to get into stuff and uh you talk about the monitors we actually bought big monitors for them so they could remote in do their data because they had big stuff in your screens they would put this data with um and they would take turns coming into the office to get the test kicked off and then watch it remotely so they had cameras and a desktop and all kinds of stuff to go along with that assistant Because systems weren’t made to be remoted into because it was supposed to be secure. We had to work around that and still be compliant, which is difficult. But we got it working impressively, I have to say. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 35:54.022
as critical infrastructure, we still had, I think the lowest we ever got was somewhere in the 50 to 40 percent still in the office. And of course, we did all of the social distancing. So that was part of it. It didn’t take but a couple of weeks of me working at home before my wife was like, go back to the office.
Speaker 1 | 36:16.378
I need a space. My wife’s like, oh, no, no, we’re not doing it. So actually, I was in the office pretty much the whole way through the whole COVID thing because it was easier to deal with stuff there because no one was in the office. We had manufacturing, but there had been ships and the corporate side of the office. So there was literally no one. a lot of t people we all work and it’s kind of sat where we want it because the office is pretty empty so we have plenty of space actually a lot more done that way i think is that because you didn’t have to worry about barking or power outage or anything else because it’s a facility you know pretty hard blurred backgrounds virtual backgrounds green screens all that funny stuff a couple times that people
Speaker 0 | 37:07.162
turn their camera on and you could tell they’ve been lounging about for a couple days so one of the other things that i always wonder about and and looking for and want to help the next generation with is you know what are what do you feel are the things or the attributes that helped you get out from being in in the server room or programming or in the network closet and those kinds of things how did you Or what were the tricks or what were the things that helped you become a leader within IT, let alone within the organization? Because, you know, senior director of IT, so you’re talking to the CEO. You put that down many times that you’re working with the C-suite throughout your resume. Was it just having personality or was it something being forced into that interaction? What kind of things helped you get out?
Speaker 1 | 38:03.846
It was kind of both in my early career because when I had left, I said I left, moved from the engineering department into the MIS at the time, as we called it, the engineers would talk to me because they knew me. So they wouldn’t go to the IT department. And it kind of forced me to be able to talk to them and make a point to try to explain to them, like, no, we can’t make a 3D model of your… Well, I saw it on a movie. No, that was Star Trek, and we’re not Star Trek. Yeah. And so I have to explain to them what we could do and what we couldn’t do. I think they helped me in that part of my career to get a little more out to the people. But I find that going forward, you know, I do have to be technical and work with my technical team and understand their thought process and how they work. But, you know, it’s important, I think, for an IT leader to also understand what the other people are doing. You know, working with the C-suite isn’t. everybody’s in everybody’s wheelhouse, so to speak, but they still talk to people. And I think that, you know, for an IT leader to start off with, you know, you talk to people, remember, they’re not IT, which is really hard for us, right? You know, that’s why we call it IT nerds. You know, we have really hard times. Everybody says, you know, hey, can we do this? I’m like, oh, are you kidding me? I have a, you know, flux capacitor with 30,000 gigawatts of, you know, and they like, their face goes blank.
Speaker 0 | 39:28.770
Yeah, I find it interesting that you, in the beginning of it, you were translating nerd to geek. And then you finally went from nerd and geek into business. And that’s one of the things that I found that I had to do was a lot of that translation, be able to really talk to the, I’m one of them, but to the backroom dwellers. I was going to call us cave dwellers.
Speaker 1 | 39:56.925
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 39:57.842
You know, the people that just want, just slide me some pizza, man. some pizza and an energy jerry can leave me alone to the uh the business people who are they’re worried about that bottom line they’re worried about the efficiency the uh um what it means to the business and and how does it how does it affect the business what’s it going to cost and what’s it going to return you know that’s that return on investment you don’t know that yeah um figured out in a lot of in a lot of ways i think because of work you know we always do work
Speaker 1 | 40:31.118
cost center not a revenue generator um is what they always tell us but the sales team needs the ipads and cell phones and then laptops and connectivity and you know all the stuff that they need around it to sell their stuff but they’d still they consider a cost center versus revenue but you know i found that you know keeping that mindset you’re doing that you know making friends with the cfo um was the first thing and it wasn’t easy because cfo always said okay well can you do it for half the price um Well, yeah, if you want wind up boys, we can do that. And, uh, you know, I found that, you know, dealing with the business side of it and the CFO I now actually are friends. And, uh, if I start to say something, he’ll say, he’ll look at me and he’ll say, even if I go, what? And he goes, exactly. I won’t do it if you don’t do it.
Speaker 0 | 41:19.022
Earnings before taxes and depreciation taxes.
Speaker 1 | 41:23.646
Yeah. Yeah. I think for the young leaders today, and there’s some great young leaders out there, because they want to bridge that gap. And I think one of the things we have in IT today, different than we did back in the day, is a lot more people, not that they know the technology, but they understand it a little better. They’re not amazed by VoIP and gig connections, because everybody has cell phones and smartphones and stuff. But they do lack that knowledge of what it really can do. And so as an IT leader, you can leverage that, I think, to get… a better relationship with the end user going, yeah, you can take it from that level and move forward versus ground zero. I used to deal with, when I first started my career with the guys that would draw everything with a pencil on a big sheet of paper. And then, you know, now it’s all computer generated and, you know, there’s no drafting tables in our whole building, but yeah, we saw a drawing that they do on.
Speaker 0 | 42:21.004
One of my directors is always, he’s not drawing it on paper, but he’s going to the whiteboard. he’s standing up and starting to explain and they just have to draw it out. They got to draw it out and work, work through it. And sometimes just that process of it helps, helps them understand it better and just makes it easier for them to explain. But even the geek on geek discussions, they’re, they’re drawing things out.
Speaker 1 | 42:48.832
Yeah. I, I, I can be honest. I still default to my whiteboard and sometimes it helps me get it in my head. And some of the. of a young lady that works for me and it’s kind of funny because she just i’ll start drawing does that help you to help me at all but you keep going that hurt a little bit i’m not gonna lie but i still do it yeah yeah well um yeah i think it’s just it’s hard leading people say because because of the technology as well as the other issue we didn’t have is they they think they know it you know hey i have a cousin who works in it Well, no, he works at Best Buy. That’s not the same thing. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 43:29.349
he has those. I’ve run into, I’m starting to run into more of a different generation, too. Excuse me. We started working with RPA. And, of course, we’re calling them bots. And some of the older IT people are trying to figure out, okay, what do we got to do to build the… the back end databases so that we can optimize these things and so they can go faster. And we brought in somebody new who had done a little bit of stuff with it, but she was doing customer service and she just like took to it like a duck to water. And her way of thinking of it is different than those of us that have been around for a while. And so she’s got a different approach to it. But. I think it has to do with that generation that, you know, grew up and always had this level of technology with them. The ones that you ask them what a collect phone call is and they go, isn’t that when they call you and they’re trying to get money from you?
Speaker 1 | 44:37.053
Nubian Prince, right? Yeah. Yeah, it’s funny because my one son is actually studying data science and he gets it like hands down. And he goes, oh, I get you now. Some of the programming stuff he doesn’t get so much, but he understands how the whole thing works. He can visualize it, but he didn’t know how to use a dial-a-thon. It’s his grandmother’s house he picked up because he was making noise. It’s called a dial-a-thon, son. But the other stuff, he understands it. I think probably because he works that stuff all day while he’s playing as well. You know, the new games and all the technology because of his games, graphics, as well as all the information at the fingertips. It makes a big difference.
Speaker 0 | 45:20.817
All right. You know what? You just made me think of a completely divergent question here. Favorite video game? You had to have played a couple of them.
Speaker 1 | 45:31.072
Well, Doom is the only one at the time. I like Halo, and I hate to admit it, but my son will sit down and play a little bit of Halo, and a friend of mine said, really? I said, I don’t know, it’s just kind of cool. The guy comes out of the sky and he just kind of lands, and he starts moving, and it just amazes me. It’s just so much fun. But in my head, I’m thinking, wow, how much processing is going on to get this scenery, and you turn your head, and it literally instantaneously generating that view and it just amazes me i think it’s really cool game so it’s fun yeah have you had a chance to play with anything i’ve tried it um but no i’m not not actually played any virtual games like in depth i did try to one of the shows uh sony had the headset samsung i mean how they had the headset in the phone that was pretty cool um because the user controls the phone was in the headset and you kind of turn and it was uh kind of amazing
Speaker 0 | 46:29.332
Yeah, your description of talking about how, you know, looking around and how everything was being rendered and everything just kind of made me think of the virtual realities and some of those. And I remember the first chance I got to play with one and, you know, thinking back to Space Invaders and how it was such a two-dimensional, top-down kind of experience. And then going into the virtual world where, you know, things are coming at you from every direction, absolutely every direction and trying to. play and clear the air, so to speak, in that kind of a world was just such a difference. And I mean, that’s the same kind of difference in technology from where we started this conversation to where we’re at today. Everything coming at you from every different direction. How’s your workload on a day-to-day basis? How are you doing with that? Because I know I’m personally, I’m drowning and the organization is demanding things faster than they’ve ever wanted them before. And there are more and more requests.
Speaker 1 | 47:40.905
Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot. I mean, you get to stop. I always like to use the phrase, sometimes I have no idea what’s going on. There’s so much stuff coming in. It’s the… We always call it the Amazon mentality at work. They go, well, I want this. Can you guys deliver this tomorrow? Next day delivery. It’s not that easy. We’ve got to build it all out. But yeah, it puts a heavier workload because there’s a lot more going on, a lot more technology changes, and people want something different. They need a sales team as they go through. They go to a conference and they come back and go, why can’t we do this? And if we do this, why can’t we do this? And we’d go. our guys are not really sales guys anymore but um company reps i deal a lot with data so uh you’ve got to have the dynamic kind of data with all times and that changes you know that’s you know not like the old days you do a cube and run it and read a report and this is like live data so as they move from place to place it gives them all the points of the need for discussions within that region demographics it’s uh age gap it’s uh race money so they need all these different things where they’re going because that’s who they deal with and it depends on what neighborhood they’re in as to how they deal with the doctors the hospitals that they go to so it makes it for a really busy day um i think i’m down to seven days a week now but yeah oh you only have to work seven days a week yeah i thought about the seven yeah i’d limit you 16 16 to 24 hours a day 70 but yeah that’s pretty much it The cell phone, like you said earlier, the cell phone is amazing because you can be on vacation, you can be out of country, you can be in the jungle and it’s like your phone works everywhere now. Or it used to be if you’re off, you’re off. I think that’s the biggest we have today with some burnout is that it’s always on.
Speaker 0 | 49:38.766
Yeah, well, and it’s one of the things that I’ve learned to do is just be able to set that thing down and or segregate from the work life that’s. contained within it to the personal life. And so I pay attention to my stuff on the weekends. And, you know, I know that… Got my coworkers set so that if they need me, text or call, because I’m not necessarily watching email all the time. You’re not going to get a 15-minute response from me on email, but you text me or call me, you’ll get a much faster response.
Speaker 1 | 50:15.539
Yeah, I had to start doing that because it was getting literally way too much. And COVID was bad because people had more time and they were working a lot of odd hours. But when I came back to work, I thought that would slow down, but it didn’t seem to slow down. It just kind of changed a little bit. But you still have people at 5 o’clock on a Saturday morning that think that I’m always sitting with my phone in my hand and they need something. And yeah, to sit down and walk away is hard. It took a lot of inner strength to do that because I’m so used to being right there and being able to answer questions. And to sit down and walk away and do something is relatively new for me, but it makes a big difference in managing.
Speaker 0 | 50:55.846
load yeah all right so so making friends with the cfo being able to translate geek to business um understanding the the cost factor and and ebita um
Speaker 1 | 51:12.410
what other things yeah you know and i think just in general is um i would tell my staff you know be nice it sounds silly but it’s one of those things that If somebody, when they call you, they’re already mad, right? No one ever calls to help us or calls IT because they want to see how you’re doing. So they’re already in a bad mood. So the key there is to address the accordingly, kind of talk them off the ledge. But I think, you know, all those things, understanding the business, why they’re calling, what the impact is to them, not just for yourself. But somebody, like Connie called and said they can’t enter a bill, that’s a big deal to them. They may not see that much to you, but, you know, understanding what they’re doing. I think that… you know, understand that technology is advanced and that people know more than they used to. You couldn’t just tell them you’re hiding their token for the token ring in the closet. Yeah, you need a new token. Yeah, now they have a general idea. So I think you’re taking a different approach altogether. But yeah.
Speaker 0 | 52:10.866
I wonder how many people listening to this got that one.
Speaker 1 | 52:15.489
Yeah, that’s an old joke there, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 52:19.031
Yeah, back to the S400.
Speaker 1 | 52:21.473
Yep. back to good old days. But yeah, I think that today and it’s my son had just shown me a TikTok video, which is funny in itself, but about a young lady who was moved because her boss was nice. I found that amazing that somewhere along the line people kind of quit being nice. I think that it’s not really everybody but you always hear about the worst stuff. But I think too is that when people call the industry, they want something fixed now and understand that that’s their mindset. And you have to talk them off that ledge and go, I can’t fix it. Sometimes it can take a longer to be patient with them because there’s that, like I said earlier, the Amazon mentality and Amazon is great. You get what you need quickly, but the, the expectations around that and around for people has really made it a little more difficult. I think anybody will support the industry, in my opinion.
Speaker 0 | 53:20.694
Yeah, I agree for sure. I mean, it was one of the, it took me a little while to pick up on that lesson. And typically it was more when I was being the one requesting that support and help where like we’d have a network outage and I’m on the phone with the ISP and I finally got a person who’s talking to me, helping me work through all of the issues. And for me, the C-suite would show up over my shoulder and start just there. they’re yelling at me trying to get me to move faster and want me yelling at the other guy. And I’m like, I, I’m not yelling at him. He’s helping me. I want him to be my friend. I don’t want him thinking, how can I get this guy off the phone? I want them, you know, invested in helping me succeed and to get services restored. And you definitely get that with kindness a little better than you do with. or at least I do, than with yelling at people and screaming at them. Because, yeah, I haven’t been able to catch many bees with that kind of honey.
Speaker 1 | 54:27.885
Yeah, it doesn’t seem to work. It’s amazing when you, just a quick story. The CEO had called me and he was yelling and screaming. I said, well, you know, hey, let’s just check your, he’s at home working, let’s check your router and reboot it. Because he reboots an old BlinkSys router. he said no that’s not what it is but okay he’s being very turd you know all right well but then listen when you figure it out give me a call back we’ll walk through it um a little calmer maybe and said bobby right here i’ll effectively take my phone with me even in the bathroom you know you call audience right away and uh i thought he was gonna hang up and he get real quiet and he goes i’m sorry what would you like me to do let’s let’s walk through it you know i understand i’ll stay in the front hallway they rebooted it and took the 10 minutes and didn’t come back his router was acting up and so let’s just unplug it wait you know a couple minutes i did that and i said you know hey your son play soccer right how’s it going you know season still going on and we started talking next thing okay it’s been five minutes really yeah i’ll be back and everything worked yeah taking the time to talk them off the ledge really helped the conversation and get things done more efficiently instead of yelling and screaming for 10 minutes so we took five minutes and talked about something and he got him off the ledge and he was calmer and we
Speaker 0 | 55:47.196
got fixed i think it’s a something to keep in mind and i think it’s a good useful tool yeah definitely a calm attitude and some kindness to help and then they know that you’re invested in trying to help them solve that problem whatever that happens to be yeah exactly what about what about the um the ticket that just sticks in your mind or that that phone call that trouble ticket not not necessarily the ceo but what’s what’s one of the uh the cases that just he just shake your head from that stuck with you
Speaker 1 | 56:27.054
Well, you know, this is, it’s great. And because to this day, and it was way back in the, what must have been the early 2000s. And a gentleman had a laptop and we’re actually in the office. I was in my office. The power went out in the whole building. The whole building’s out. Right.
Speaker 0 | 56:50.273
Is it the laptop?
Speaker 1 | 56:51.914
Yep. She walked in and the glow of the laptop’s on his face. He’s got the laptop in his hand. He goes, I can’t get to the network. It’s pitch black. So I just calmly took his laptop and turned around so he could see my face. I gave it a look like, really? And I handed it back to him. And when I handed it back to him, his head was down. You could see his face going, oh, jeez. Because prior to that, he had desktops and powers out, powers out. But since his screen was still on, he just figured everything else was on. But he came in pitch black to tell me that. But to this day, it still takes my life. Because I think sometimes when people… they get so involved with what they’re doing, they’ve missed the point. So, gee, the floor is wet.
Speaker 0 | 57:35.396
If you flip this one on me, I was going to come up with something kind of the same, where it was one of those times where it was me. I spent like an hour and a half, two hours troubleshooting a desktop with a guy, and he swore the power button wasn’t working. And I knew which desk he was sitting at. I could picture the computer. I knew how it was set up. He’s in one of our other offices that’s 45 miles away. And he swears the computer just will not turn on. And so I’m troubleshooting things with him. I’m talking to him about where’s the power strip plugged in? Is the power strip turned on? And we’re following cords. And I’m walking him through all of these things. And he’s like, And finally, I’m like, wait a minute, you know, which button are you pushing? And what happens when you push it? And I finally realized he’s pushing the power button on the monitor and turning the monitor on and off and not understanding why the computer won’t come up. And the lesson for me there was that, you know, sometimes the simplest answer is the right one. and I had to I immediately bypassed that one going no way it can’t be that it can’t be that he’s pushing the wrong power button so you know I put in an hour and a half two hours trying to help him walk through all of these things and it just was yeah face palm double face palm yeah I think we have a lot of moments like that talking through keyboard
Speaker 1 | 59:21.841
not working and finding out there’s some plugs um that never happened to me oh no you ever done it yeah that’s what i’m talking about um i had the little cordless i had the little dongle plugged in the wrong it was plugged in i think it wasn’t working i almost called the help desk too i was kind of embarrassed i got walked away i walked back in i was like oh my god it’s plugged in the wrong thing yeah yeah good thing you didn’t sell the ticket Right, they never let the level down.
Speaker 0 | 59:57.348
Any other tricks or any other lessons that you’ve learned over the three decades?
Speaker 1 | 60:03.950
Yeah, you know, I would say that the biggest thing in IT is always that, like I said earlier, people call. They don’t call because they’re happy. It just doesn’t happen. But, you know, when you set that relationship up, it spreads faster. It makes it a lot easier. Because you know they’re upset, but they’re more willing to talk to you about what’s going on. And like you said, when you walk through the steps, they’re a little easier to deal with when they’re checking the power cords and things of that nature. I think the thing today is all the technology has changed so much that jumping from laptops and MacBooks to iPads and iPhones and jumping around, it’s a lot to keep track of. But having a good, diverse team that, you know, we call them SMEs, we just… subject matter experts i take cross train everybody to make sure that people are um we have a subject matter expert but then he has a backup she has a backup and that gives us the ability to do what we need to get done but also something gets heavy we can’t figure out that the uh powers in the buildings out um you know he can call somebody and they kind of go oh this is this is probably going to be this and it does help a lot especially with the manufacturing side of things so unique having somebody that specializes in is important but also that they cross-trained somebody else. So they have the ability to talk through an issue sometimes. It does help. I think that’s a key. Somebody at least understands what they’re doing. You made us successful.
Speaker 0 | 61:39.101
Yeah, I think that’s one of the biggest lessons that I’ve always tried to drive home and make sure. You’ve got to remember what the goal is. And or sometimes you’ve got to dig out the goal. There’s so many times that they call, they’re upset, and they know exactly what they want. But all they have is Excel, so everything looks like a formula problem. Put the new twist on that. If you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so there’s so many times where the toolkit that I’m aware of brings so many more solutions. But if I don’t ask what the goal is, then I’m just going to hand them the hammer.
Speaker 1 | 62:22.799
Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, it starts off with… you know what are you trying to do that’s always a good question you know they’re trying to i need adobe back from that program they go to the holy spirit what are you trying to do try to sign a document yeah well we have docu sign i was going to do the book here upload it and send it off to be signed and we actually use right there but um sometimes it’s asking questions up front that’s a good point yeah sometimes i forget that you know one hand in the hammer they’re looking for an l5
Speaker 0 | 62:54.864
Yeah. Here’s the hammer. Go away.
Speaker 1 | 62:58.105
Just leave my office. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 63:00.666
That reminds me of those guys that just said, here, just move over. Let me sit here. Let me sit there. I’ll, I’ll fix it for you.
Speaker 1 | 63:07.009
Yeah. It’s just, you know, my, my, uh, CFO does that. He’ll call me and go, what are you doing? Oh God, this can’t be good. What do you need? Can you come over here? I said, yes. And he’ll, he’ll, when I walk in his office, he’s actually standing next to his death in his arms for us. Like, why don’t you sit down and figure out how to do this? No, no, just do it. Okay. And so that was kind of funny.
Speaker 0 | 63:31.436
If I show you how to do it, then I don’t have to do it again next week.
Speaker 1 | 63:35.239
Exactly, yeah. It’s like once, about twice a month, his printer doesn’t work, and so it’s the same thing. Well, you unplugged it. No, I didn’t. Well, somebody unplugged it. We’ll just fix it for him. I’m not sure what happened there.
Speaker 0 | 63:52.221
Let’s get a camera on this to see who does it.
Speaker 1 | 63:55.203
I got him for you. I got him for you. What he does is he takes his docking station home, then he forgets to plug something. That’s it. He’ll get over it. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 64:08.853
No, that’s always fun with those ones where you’re like, here, let me just get that.
Speaker 1 | 64:14.837
Yeah. Just me.
Speaker 0 | 64:20.056
Oh, man. Well, it’s been an awesome discussion. Hey, is there anything out there that you want to promote? Anything that you’re doing on the side, your personal life?
Speaker 1 | 64:30.081
No, it’s literally, it seems like all I ever do is work. But, you know, I liked, you know, in my, just real quick, there’s a young lady, Alicia, that worked. She was working the front desk and had just a little IT experience and she was embarrassed and didn’t think it was deep enough. And… I found out and I said, you got to tell people. So if you think you can do it, tell somebody. It’s always worth a shot. And it gets really, like you mentioned that young lady earlier, something because of really good talent from the strangest places. And they end up being really good at what they do. I always tell people I’m management and working with teams is, you know, sometimes it’s a good idea to give that person a chance because it may just benefit both of you.
Speaker 0 | 65:10.592
Yeah. And actually, you know, that’s a very good point because I’ve seen more of that. And I’ve always had, I can teach people technology, but trying to find somebody that has the personality or. believes in or subscribes to the culture and wants to be helpful and useful. Those are a little harder to find. You can’t necessarily teach that. That seems to be something that’s innate in people.
Speaker 1 | 65:44.008
Yeah, it is. I think it’s, when you get to the kind of people, they’re the people to hold on to, too, because they’re more apt to move on because they’re good at what they do. Not just because they’re technically sound, but also because they can tell people. about how technically they’re sound in a good way.
Speaker 0 | 66:01.189
Yeah. Yeah, they have those communication skills that are needed so that they can talk and translate between business to business, business to mechanics, business to nerd.
Speaker 1 | 66:14.152
Yeah. Yeah, right. And the last one’s the hardest sometimes.
Speaker 0 | 66:17.713
Sometimes, man. Yeah, because of that glaze in the eyes that we’ve all seen.
Speaker 1 | 66:22.654
Yeah, the new ones, cybersecurity and so on. There’s meetings and it looks on people’s faces. They say fishing and smishing and I try talking and they know the terms but then they still don’t get it. They start glazing and thinking about the lake house. Yeah. It’s like, ooh,
Speaker 0 | 66:43.829
fishing.
Speaker 1 | 66:44.930
Fishing.
Speaker 0 | 66:46.571
Yeah. I want to grill.
Speaker 1 | 66:47.071
Yeah. That’s a big thing. I think you don’t click it. That’s what I would tell you. Don’t click it. I think you don’t click it. That’s what I would tell you. Don’t click it. Yeah. CDO is not going to have for Amazon card.
Speaker 0 | 67:00.755
Or Google card. Google gift card. Yeah. Good gift card. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 67:03.718
It’s just back on it. I mean, if it’s for me, you go ahead and do it. But otherwise it’s just back. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 67:13.185
Oh man. All right, Matt. Well, anything else?
Speaker 1 | 67:17.489
No, Mike, that’s great. It was great talking to you. It’s reminiscing. It’s kind of fun. I think it’s, um, I don’t get a lot of talk because, uh, a lot of times people. even the guys have been around for a while uh most of the guys i deal with that work for me and stuff are still young enough they don’t know what a i think as400 is a car um you know like they compete with tesla no no it’s actually never mind um yeah backup tapes it’s not we just had a discussion about what backup tapes when a guy said you mean like real tape and i said yeah i thought that was just a phrase like what never mind yeah yeah just to this this tape
Speaker 0 | 67:53.600
taped to off-site.
Speaker 1 | 67:55.180
Yeah, it’s a big mountain somewhere.
Speaker 0 | 68:00.202
Ever watched Mr. Robot?
Speaker 1 | 68:05.943
Yeah. It’s always fun to talk about reminiscing. It’s been a long time. From the beginning to the dot bombs up until today, it just seems like everything’s interconnected. They would say the Internet of Things, which I hate that phrase, almost as much as the cloud. But it’s true, you know, everything kind of connects nowadays. You have to be really careful. If we talk about security, it’s not just computers anymore. It’s everything.
Speaker 0 | 68:29.332
Amen on that. You know, you were bringing up a bunch of the different phrases that we’re hearing a lot of today. One of the ones that I’m not hearing so much today but has affected my world so much is the consumerization of IT. And now they’re building there. We’re building solutions for individuals. And then somebody comes into the office and says, well, I can do it on my phone. Why can’t you do this for the company? And the difference between an enterprise solution versus a solution for an individual, sometimes that one’s hard to explain to people.
Speaker 1 | 69:07.337
Yeah, and it can be tough to get around that. And let’s see if it’s the CEO and he’s on a plane talking to somebody and he comes back and goes, you know what I can do on my phone? Oh, dear God. Here we go. It used to be they’d read the magazines now, or they’d watch a TikTok video, and this guy’s doing his whole house is automated, and all of a sudden he wants to automate the office. We can,
Speaker 0 | 69:26.672
but let’s go talk to the CFO about how much it’s going to cost.
Speaker 1 | 69:34.336
Yeah, it’s the money thing is always interesting. We had to write a program during COVID to help track. It took a while. I said, I can just do this on my phone for a grocery list. It’s a little more complicated than that. He had his own little app that showed him how to do it. It’s all practice, but we’ve got a whole…
Speaker 0 | 69:59.790
you know a couple hundred people out in the field we have to track them here in the office it’s full now happy people compliant we have kids data a whole bunch of other factors there yeah made it more difficult for sure yeah that’s exactly what i’m talking about and the difference between an individual solution or
Speaker 1 | 70:18.299
a solution for an individual and a solution for an enterprise yeah so exactly one drive yeah the one drivers is shared SharePoint, you know, you have the two succinctly different. I can’t do this. You can share one file versus this is where the file share is. It’s complicated. Like, if you sync it to my phone, you can’t sync the entire share to your phone. Look, it’s right there. See?
Speaker 0 | 70:56.115
Your phone has how many gigs?
Speaker 1 | 70:59.786
Is that a new phone?
Speaker 0 | 71:02.407
That’s pretty cool. You know that we’re talking about terabytes in the back office, right? Or up in the cloud? Yeah. All right, Matt. It’s been a wonderful episode. And, you know, I look forward to seeing how things go on this. And I’d love to talk to you again sometime.
Speaker 1 | 71:25.870
So, yeah, I loved you, Mike. It really did. It was enjoyable. Like I said, like the women, maybe you can talk some about some fishing, fishing stories next time.
Speaker 0 | 71:33.535
Yeah. Fish and fishing and actually get into the cybersecurity stuff because, man, I get so many calls and emails about that right now. It’s ridiculous. It’s probably 30 percent of the spam I get is all all of the different one off vendors trying to sell me their their snake oil.
Speaker 1 | 71:52.087
Yeah, pretty much. You need this to fix this. It started off as a product industry, and now pretty much every company has to have somebody that specializes in cybersecurity and all the stuff that goes around it. It’s a lot.
Speaker 0 | 72:09.497
But it’s also amazing how much of an industry it has become. When that whole deal with SolarWinds happened, I started paying a lot more attention again and really looking at what has happened and how it’s progressed over the last 10 years. And it’s a true industry on its own. You know, both the red team and blue team, if you don’t know those terms, find out what they are.
Speaker 1 | 72:35.886
Google it.
Speaker 0 | 72:37.027
Yeah. And it’s more than just Halo.
Speaker 1 | 72:40.388
Yeah, more than Halo. It is. And it’s, like I said, part of the industry. But it’s a bigger impact on IT. I think we used to have some of the other issues we had back in the day. bigger impact because like i said the internet of things people go home and they hook up their laptop and they they’re unfiltered you know thermostat and they want to know how they get hacked and yeah just the cacophony of issues arise from the outside you need to worry about your laptop and i was worried about everybody else’s laptop it makes for a lot more discussion did you change the password on your refrigerator yeah yeah right i didn’t know my new one does that i’m amazed by the fight i don’t know what i can do with it but yeah it’s kind of the internet well as long as it brings a pot of coffee for me at the right time then i’m good exactly when i get up the coffee’s ready i’m gonna get a lot of you all right matt
Speaker 0 | 73:46.678
You have a wonderful evening, and thanks again for listening in on another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds with Matt Dawson.
Speaker 1 | 73:54.703
Thanks, Mike. Have a great night.
Speaker 0 | 73:56.384
All right. You too, sir. Thank you.
