Speaker 0 | 00:00.180
I did go back to school and study computer information system. And that was a big plus. But really, a lot of my education was getting my internship.
Speaker 1 | 00:21.305
All right. Welcome, everyone, back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we are talking with Colin Keyes. I encourage everybody, highly, highly encourage you to search him, find him on LinkedIn. And what you will see is a similar spitting image of myself with a real significant beard. I love it. I want to applaud you for people. You must get a lot like. Hey, really cool beard guy. How long did that take you? Do you get that common question a lot? Like how long did that take you?
Speaker 0 | 01:05.184
And coincidentally, I actually started growing the beard right before I switched to working in IT. So it’s almost, I always knew it as a connection, but I do get it a lot, mostly at stores. But a lot of times when I’m on sales calls, I’ll get it. I had one rep at one company who at times I thought was a bit too obsessed with my beard. So in fact, when I trimmed it once over the summer, he was like almost upset that I had cut my beard.
Speaker 1 | 01:39.016
What’s wrong with you? Sometimes I put on a shirt and I forget to pull my beard out of the shirt. So I’m walking around with my beard like tucked into the shirt. And I walked into a place the other day and the guy’s like, what happened? What’d you do? And I’m like, what are you talking about? He’s like, the beard, it’s gone. I’m like, oh, sorry. And then I pulled it out of my shirt and he was like, oh. So, yes.
Speaker 0 | 02:07.753
My biggest issue I’ve had too is I’m a big fan of the pearl snap shirt, but it keeps getting caught in the pearl snaps. And that’s usually when I know it’s time to trim up the length a little bit is when you get caught in the pearl snaps.
Speaker 1 | 02:18.857
Yes. Yes. True. True. Back to the important stuff, the beard. Yes, gets caught. It’s really annoying when it gets caught in the buttons and other sharp objects. You said you’re a diehard sports fan. I’m a diehard jiu-jitsu fan, and I’m still trying to figure out how to do… There’s no legal ruling in IBJJF, in the professional rulebook yet, on using a beard. They’ve slowly ruled out things when people figured out how to take a belt off and tie it around someone’s neck like a noose. Um, they’ve, you know, I’ve ruled out things like that, but they have yet to rule out a beard. So I’m still trying to figure out how to do this like loop choke where I can reach around and no gi with some and grab my own beard. If you have any clue what I’m talking about and choke someone, same thing in the UFC, I’m waiting for someone with a really long beard in the UFC to choke someone with their own beard, which would be cool if you could like wrap it around your neck, you know, and choke someone out. So maybe that’s too violent for this show. The.
Speaker 0 | 03:24.352
history first to go back there was the story of atilla the hun who did the opposite was he cut all of his soldiers beards off and there’s a rumor that they singed their faces so their beards wouldn’t grow so that the aryanese soldiers couldn’t grab it and stab them with the sword and so it became a reverse competitive advantage but i’d rather grow the beard out and uh it
Speaker 1 | 03:46.487
looks funny when they don’t have it so yeah you you yeah when i shave my i look like i’m back like i’m like 12. It’s just not right. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 03:56.982
Fiance has said, she’s like, don’t ever trim it off. That’s, it must remain. She’s like, no, that won’t.
Speaker 1 | 04:03.608
That’s why I, you know, she’s like, that’s why I chose you. Exactly. Okay. So to the real stuff, IT leadership, you’re a business technology manager, past information technology manager. Do titles really even matter? But what’s even better is your really accurate summation of yourself in the about section and amalgamation of paradoxes with an exceptional ability to rise above uncertainty and instability to solve complex and ever changing problems, which is really, I had someone very truthfully describe what, and this is a guy that’s not like a low level it leader at all. This is like a big time it leader. And he really just. I think maybe he’s in leadership because he told the truth so well. He said, Phil, when I first started, my boss told me. You’re like a forest ranger and there’s fires all around you and you need to figure out how to survive, how to stay alive. So you don’t put the fires out that are like far away. You put the fires out that are right around you because those are the ones that are going to burn you. It was kind of, I was thinking, oh, how true, how true. And. we talk about leadership and it leadership, how we’re going to have this perfect machine running flawlessly with all systems in place and everything just kind of running on automatic. And I’m sitting back in my seat watching no tickets come in while I put my feet up on the desk.
Speaker 0 | 05:49.911
Is that,
Speaker 1 | 05:50.451
yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s what we’re all after. We’re all fighting the dream, but is the dream a mirage that we’re never going to find or you tell me.
Speaker 0 | 05:59.108
I would say that they’re 100% a mirage. I kind of view things from IT at this point. As we mentioned, I have a big sports fan, and I came up with this analogy while talking about IT from the support side, which was your IT department is like the offensive line on a football team. You do your job, nobody knows you’re there, but if you screw up, everyone’s going to notice. And… What I try to do is I don’t want to get noticed. That’s my job. And having been a former high school offensive lineman, I didn’t want to get noticed. So I always try to keep my head down and do my job and get things done. So that’s always kind of been my IT mentality was don’t ever rock the boat. But what we what I’d like to do is, and as I said, you know, the amalgamation of paradox things is always kind of my go to. I don’t view myself as your normal IT manager or business tech manager. My background is a little bit different than some people. And I got into IT a lot later in my life. It was in my 30s by the time I was there. And in fact, I was somebody who once used the term, how can you be this computer stupid to describe me? And the fact that I work in IT blows a lot of my roommates from college mind. But what I got was the ability to, as my job coach when he went back to college said, he goes, you have personality. You think next to people and you understand what the tech people are saying. You understand what the client is saying. So you are the ideal person to be in management when it comes to technology. And I think that’s what brought my skill set to the level. So what I’ve done was I’ve made sure I brought in the right people around. So I bring people who have the skill sets to make up where I don’t have it. but I have the management side of it to help bring the other people down as well.
Speaker 1 | 08:01.589
So it just makes me curious as to what happened to make you get into IT when you were so computer stupid.
Speaker 0 | 08:15.000
Well, it was one of those, I mean, I spent a lot of time kind of bumping around careers, and I grew up working in construction. My family had a construction company. Those were always kind of my primary industries. And then for a period I was actually working in sports marketing and that took me to the Colorado area and worked in sales for restaurant equipment and a number of other sales jobs and usually only made it about a year before I’d be let go and have to find another position and move back to Portland where I grew up and got another job and a year later I was gone. go and I go, you know, maybe it’s not the job. Maybe I’m the one who’s not a good fit. So I decided to take some time to kind of figure out what I wanted to do and took one of those career assessment exams that they always talk about. They go, oh, according to this, you’d be really good at computer programming. And they said the term that everybody always told me when they talked about computers and computer programming, you must be really good at math. And my response was, no, I suck at math. I am terrible at math. And that was actually what always kept me away from computers was that I thought you had to be good at math. I thought you had to, you know, be this math genius. You know, I was the guy who was barely getting by, you know, passing math in high school because I just, the concepts did not click with me. And it wasn’t until I actually started working and taking the classes that I looked at it like, it’s not math. problem solving it’s like you’re approaching this entirely wrong you know there’s a whole bunch of people out there who could be great for this industry that you pushed away because You told them it was math, you know, tell them it’s problem solving. There’s a lot of people who solve problems who don’t, who are terrible at math. I’m a prime example of that. So, you know, the problem solving side of it was what really pulled me in. And, you know, I like solving problems. I like looking at the bigger picture and finding and dissecting, you know, identifying the root cause of things.
Speaker 1 | 10:25.158
I think you said one thing in there that was really. profound which was maybe it’s not them maybe it’s me i don’t know if everyone’s that brave or willing to take a look inside and be vulnerable and i guess self-problem solve so but was it true i mean was it you or was it just i mean what was it i mean 100
Speaker 0 | 11:01.879
I was not, I’m a, I’m a, I was a terrible sales person.
Speaker 1 | 11:04.940
Sales can be learned. Sales can be learned though. I mean, it sounds like you’d be good.
Speaker 0 | 11:08.022
Sales can be learned, but for me, it was, I part of it was my personality in general. Um, but I have this, I have a thing and I guess it was part of the way I grew up working and working in construction and that I don’t like my results and outcome to be dependent upon other people. I like work to speak. for itself and people go oh well if you put into the work you know for sales and make the calls then the sales are going to come and i had a sales manager who told me that i said i want you to sit with me for one day on the phone see what my results are i said okay so he sat with me for an entire eight hour shift and i went through and made a 315 phone calls and all of them went to voice like it’s kind of hard to sell when nobody answers the phone yeah he’s like that’s true so um but really it was one of those of a you know You can do something and you know, I sold sports. I do sports marketing for years. I work for, you know, professional lacrosse teams in Denver and Portland. And, you know, I love working in sports. It’s fantastic. But, you know, it was at the end of the day, you know, you had hit 40 adjacent numbers. And there is the stress levels there that I think ultimately in sales with what did me end was I didn’t handle the stress well. Now IT has its own level of stress but I almost like the stress here. It’s almost like I do like the ticking clock of like you know like 24 clicking down I’ve got the you know the bomb’s gonna go off if we don’t solve this IT problem. That stress I don’t mind but the sales stress of you know am I gonna hit commission this month that you know that I didn’t like dealing with.
Speaker 1 | 12:51.298
Yeah it’s um Yes. I think also sometimes sales is also about picking the right opportunity or the right job as well. Because I’ve seen tons of people that roam from job to job and they go from like, you know, there are six months, eight months, one year, the revolving kind of door. And a lot of times when I look at it, some people are given better opportunities than others. For example. Um, I’m a direct salesperson at zoom and coronavirus hits and I’m not that good of a salesperson. I’m good. Maybe I’m good. And I’ve, I’m selling zoom. I’m literally, I have what everybody needs and wants at this moment. That person’s going to be successful. Um, Where selling lacrosse equipment or lacrosse uniforms or whatever it was that you were dealing with in selling lacrosse, there’s a limited number of prospects or people to call on. Probably have, I would imagine, a strict budget or a fairly bootstrapped budget as it is because it’s lacrosse. That’s difficult.
Speaker 0 | 14:15.170
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 14:16.130
And probably unrealistic expectations of a salesperson. I’m just saying some sales gigs are realistic. Some are like a dream job and some are legitimate. Go out and make hay and you do what you do and you do it well. Yeah. You know, so, and the reason why I’m bringing it up is because one of the themes that comes up a lot on this show is IT leadership selling their plan, selling their roadmap, the up upgrades, whatever it is that they need to upper management. And I would imagine you would have a huge head start. depending you know because of your history on selling plans and or here’s how we fix broken and here’s the problem we have here’s how we’re going to solve it and it’s going to cost this much money and now i must ask you for money and sell the plan so what are your what’s your feedback there for a dropout salesperson i do think that did give me a leg up
Speaker 0 | 15:30.469
I also think my educational background helped as well. The whole having personality thing also, you know, and learning to read people also helps as you kind of understand what they’re looking for. And again, it’s also, it comes back to the problem-solving. You need to identify the problem, but you also have to identify, okay, what’s the goal? You also need to make sure that what you’re trying to present, you’re, you know, okay, we need to do an upgrade. Okay, why does this trade benefit the company? I can use a concrete example here. We’ve got a, when I came on board, we had some fairly old infrastructure at one of our locations here at Smith Optics and we needed to make an upgrade to it and, you know, as prior to me coming on board, everything was told, you know, well, it’s not in the budget and in one of the changes, you know, well, what’s the best way for finding out if something needs to be upgraded? Well, if your network goes down and everyone stops working because a piece of equipment failed. I’ve got a real world example of why we need to replace something now. So, okay, how much money did we lose because nobody was working? So, you know, now I can extrapolate and say, okay, now let’s put this as a bigger scale. If this had gone on longer, if, you know, we weren’t able to get this, you know, going in the timeframe that we did, had this gone on for days, you know, right now, we’re talking months before you could get a new core switch. So, you know, can we survive as a company being down for months? Absolutely not. So. That’s why we need to make the investment now into our piece of equipment. So you can make sure you’re aligning yourself with the company goals overall. And I think that’s part of being an IT leader now is you also have to understand and inject yourself into the overall company business. And, you know, while I have myself as business technology manager, you know, it is the IT department. But, you know, we cover more than that. You know, I’m in charge of developers. I’m in charge of application development. But, you know, we do things for the business as a whole. I work with the e-commerce department. I work with our product development team. You know, I meet with every department head at least once a month. We’ll find out, you know, what can my team do for you to help improve what you guys are doing? You know, are there tools? Is there a project? Is there something? You know, even if it’s as simple as, hey, you guys are getting back to us on tickets fast enough. You know, okay, great. That’s feedback that I need to have to help improve what we’re working on.
Speaker 1 | 17:53.823
I just realized that you’re Smith. As in Smith, the ski goggles? Yes,
Speaker 0 | 17:59.855
we are.
Speaker 1 | 18:00.176
That’s awesome. It really is. I grew up down the street from a ski mountain, a small ski mountain in a town called Princeton, Massachusetts. We’re like the only ski mountain around. My brother groomed the ski mountain. He’s also the local fire chief. But I remember my first Smith goggles, and I remember having a complete yard sale on the mountain and cracking them. Unforgettable. So with that being said, what does your customer, are you in charge or do you oversee customer experience at all? And when I say customer experience, all the technology that feeds into customer experience, whether it be CRM, telecom, call center, omni-channel, do you work directly with marketing in any aspect there?
Speaker 0 | 18:53.736
So we actually have our own. So anything handled within the website, so marketing on the website, social media, individual online ordering, direct-to-consumer, all of that is handled by me. Now, the customer service side, the phone systems, all of those, that’s handled by the business technology team. So I work with both sides. Now, the e-commerce department and I do work together on stuff where their systems integrate with ours. So it’s a teamwork thing. you know we’re we’re on the exact same side of the office you know we turn around talk to each other have meetings together um you know in fact during the interview process i interviewed with the e-commerce manager because they knew we’d be working together very often and so um you know it’s a a good team dynamic that we have we are we are separate but we do work together often and it’s part of it is a um you know it’s the their system ends of the website and keeping their parts running with the marketing end of it. dealing with that direct customer experience. My customers are the internal people who work within the organization and making sure they work. So even then, the e-commerce team is my customer. I need to make sure that the backend system for ordering is running and still functioning each day. So when we have a new product launch, the website’s going to run on Black Friday. That’s the goal. I’ve got to make sure that’s happening.
Speaker 1 | 20:22.353
Right. Avoid DDoS attacks and other things. which is security which is like so we have all these different silos hopefully not silos to manage hopefully not broken silos added silos that we don’t need but in any given company there’s probably nine to twelve different technology i don’t want to call them silos areas we’ve got you know the customer experience which we just talked about we’ve got whatever software as a service things that are you know serving our end users we’ve got some companies have mobile devices if you’re a hospital you’ve got that just up the just ridiculous and you’ve got some kind of cloud aspect nowadays most people you have security and i i wanted to almost do a section of the show on like dumb security emails because i’m looking at one right now and it’s got like a big it’s got a big red octagon stop sign everything’s in red and then there’s like a big triangle exclamation point it’s you blinking at me right now with a padlock with a skull inside of it assessing your ransomware readiness i just don’t know if like you know and then the email itself is like it just looks spammy but somehow it made it into my inbox anywho cyber threat prevention is more important than ever yes let’s state the obvious anyway so we got security we even have uh in some aspects it is in charge of other things like the hand dryer in the men’s bathroom, energy, electric, light bulbs, believe it or not. The phone system, unified communications, certainly was important during COVID. We have, I don’t know, connectivity, SD-WAN. We have firewalls and switches, and we’ve got then maybe some companies even outsourced to various different managed service providers. What Is there anything that’s helpful to the general listener out there that is, could be, would want to be in IT leadership that has personality, which is a big, which is a big factor, personality. I had a software developer, oh, we forgot software dev team. I had a software developer come to me the other day, Phil, I picked the wrong job. I hate software development. But he’s a software developer. That’s what he did. That’s what he went to college for. He’s good. He’s a very good coder. He can do it all. He hates it. And he’s got a lot of personality. A lot. You know what I mean? So as someone that came from outside, that joined technology late in his career, but probably knows technology, because I’m assuming you remember a time when there was no internet. i’m assuming yes i do yep i’m assuming you’ve used a floppy disk before i i i had the original oregon trail that’s when i had my first computer if you still have it running in your house please send me a video so we can post that if you have something i would love which i wish you had kept all my old computers every now and then i searched through my dad’s house hoping like it’s in a box up in an attic or something you know like the old texas instruments you know like
Speaker 0 | 23:43.100
the bill cosby texas instruments with cartridges or something we they were in my parents house originally but they had recently moved and so they did a great purge of all the stuff they didn’t want and so yeah they both have moved out but they uh i do remember the days of of the original floppy disk of you know i’m building it floppy i’m
Speaker 1 | 24:04.497
building an addition on my house so maybe i’ll make a special like a room for old stuff
Speaker 0 | 24:13.368
The straight up technology.
Speaker 1 | 24:15.249
Clearly, I’ve had probably 450 milligrams of caffeine today. That’s how we keep diverging off of these things. So for all these silos and various different things, is there any advice that you have for a man coming in from his 30s, having dealt with floppy disks, wished that his parents hadn’t thrown his computers away or hadn’t done the great purge? What is your advice to someone managing all these various different things? Do you even have any advice for him? Right. Because we’re back to bring it all back to there’s fires going everywhere and there’s like burning rubber outside. And I don’t know why. And all these different silos and departments that we need to cross communicate with. How do we pull it all together in this modern world?
Speaker 0 | 24:57.140
I think the best advice that I can give is, number one, accept the fact that you will never understand everything. You’re going to have to depend on other people. You’re going to have to do some research and get some more information. The other part is going to be, if you don’t know the answer, don’t fake that you do. I’ve always gone with the belief of, I’d rather hear someone tell me that, you know, we don’t have an update. We don’t know what’s going on, but here’s where we are. If you don’t update, when you tell me, no, I don’t have an update, that’s an update. You provided me an update. No, we don’t have a status update. Okay.
Speaker 1 | 25:45.512
I love that. Yeah. How many times have we been like asking people like, just show me you’re alive.
Speaker 0 | 25:54.199
Exactly. I mean, at least to show you’re contributing to the project in some way. Something’s going on.
Speaker 1 | 26:00.842
Sometimes I send out an email just to say, hey, I just want to let you know I read all your emails. Sometimes it’s, I’m not serious. Sometimes I send out an email that says, I just want to let you know I saw your emails. I don’t know if they like hearing that. Maybe that might tick them off. They might be like, yeah, well, what? What do you do? when you don’t know what you don’t know and you go out to someone and you ask for help but you don’t know if they know and they’re just you know if they’re just knowing you yeah how do you know they’re not just snowing you happens a lot with vendor management vendors in general we’re trying to evaluate i don’t know a new endpoint protection or whatever this blinking should i trust this blinking ransomware red stop sign email they might have a good product but they’ve already eliminated themselves from the field because they sent me a blinking ransomware email and it might be legitimately good right so what’s your philosophy on that one i’m hoping you say call phil howard but not everyone’s that smart not everyone’s that intelligent you know because not but anyways so when i did i saw i did go back to school and study computer information system
Speaker 0 | 27:20.172
And that was a big plus. But really, a lot of my education was getting my internship. But also, I like to call it, it wasn’t self-taught. I like calling it, as a group I was in, called it community talk. You know, I went on forums. I went through different groups and connected with people there. And so when it comes to looking at vendors and looking at products, I depend on the community. And it’s going through communities that I trust and people who’s… opinions I trust and if one of them is working with it or if they know a product that you know they trust or work with yeah I’m going to trust their vote over some random you know oh this came over with a flashing email yeah and that’s part of developing a community like this is you know you need to you build out work and I have a very large LinkedIn network. A lot of that initially started when I was working in sales, but I kept it growing because that’s part of us. And I joined a lot of message boards and different groups throughout the different communities I’m in because I feel it’s important to make those connections because you never know who’s going to have information about a product that you might need. And having, you know, it could be some just connections like, oh, hey, I do have this product. We think it’s fantastic. And here’s why. and here’s our rep you know and then you’ve got another connection through it so um you know i put a lot of faith and trust in the communities that i work with it’s one of the reasons why i 99.9999 that’s an sla that’s
Speaker 1 | 28:56.723
a fake sla we have 99 five nines uptime the that’s 99.99 of the reason why i only interview high level i.t directors on this show and i’m only saying that because the community aspect is so popular you’re going to trust a community of your peers that have demonstrated success and demonstrated and failed have picked themselves up from failure and know what not to do if that makes sense as well um i’ve never really thought of just putting this out there but yeah anyone that does have questions or weird problems because i was going to start a new section of the show which i’ll ask you in a moment um i i can i we probably have a community of maybe i think it’s about four thousand three to four thousand you know it directors mid mid-market it directors that means they’re IT manager, director, or CTO, CEO at a company of 200 to upwards of 10,000 end users. So we should just ask the community of IT directors. Again, that’s one of the reasons why I rarely have vendors on. I’ll have a vendor on if they’ve got like the super, super high level sales engineering nerd or the guy that built the platform or, you know, like in that situation, I’ll have a vendor on if it’s their nerd. Um, but rarely, you know what I mean? I’m not going to have the, the blinking light, the blinking, blinking exclamation point, which I’m still looking at. So the new section of the show is what’s your biggest fire that you’ve had to put out and how did you put it out? Maybe it should be your biggest fire that was like a raging inferno and you had no idea how to put it out and there was no. You went and you grabbed the fire extinguisher and you’re gonna know if you’re like my kids they’ve already used it There’s just an empty fire extinguisher on the wall Let’s see You can also go to most stressful moment most stressful moment in your technology career If you don’t have one, that’s good. You’re like, Phil, I’d have to go back to sales. No. No,
Speaker 0 | 31:16.521
I definitely have. Now that we put it that way, I have the most stressful moment.
Speaker 1 | 31:23.125
It could just be like 20 fires happened at one time. It could be that.
Speaker 0 | 31:27.288
So when I started at Smith, you know, I came in and there had been a previous team in place. And over the first couple of months, eventually. most of the support team had left to the point where it was myself providing most of the support and I was actually flying between Portland and Utah almost weekly to provide support at our manufacturing facility down there. And while we had our general manager and our CFO, who was also my boss at the manufacturing facility, the core switch went down. and I’m going in and there I have been warned when the last employee left. He’s like, yeah You probably need to replace that course, which it’s like 15 years old That’s like fantastic. Thanks for the warning and this is a week later
Speaker 1 | 32:24.919
I’ve had though just just to just to reminisce with you Yeah, I’ve had that like the employees walking out like hey, by the way, here’s this laptop. It’s all cracked and busted Hey, you don’t worry. You’ll do fine though Hey, the course is about to blow, but I don’t worry. You’ll be all right. Later.
Speaker 0 | 32:41.630
Yeah, you’ll be great. So of course, which goes down, you know, everyone’s panicking. It’s then that we realized that almost everything the business does runs through Utah, including the phone system. And so none of our customer service people are available because all the phones, even though they’re based in Portland, run through Utah.
Speaker 1 | 33:00.096
They’re all VPNed, Ben. What was it, an Avaya IP office or something? What were you on?
Speaker 0 | 33:07.034
I, it was a system I inherited.
Speaker 1 | 33:10.435
Shortel, Mitel, Avaya, or…
Speaker 0 | 33:12.855
Cisco.
Speaker 1 | 33:13.956
Okay, so it was like some kind of call center. I was like a call manager or something. It was,
Speaker 0 | 33:18.337
yeah, it was a call management system. And so we’re working through that. And so we have that. And then I’m being told, it’s like, well, if the internet’s down and we can’t get any of the job orders, we can’t access any of the servers, we can’t access any of these things, we’re going to have to shut down production. because no one on the floor can access any of the job files. So we’re going to have to send all the production people home. And I’m like, great. Now I’m literally shutting the entire company down because I can’t get this figured out. And so I have the CFO and the production manager standing behind me in the server room while I’m staring at an orange blinking light going, how long do you think this is going to take? And I’m looking like I honestly have no idea. So, and…
Speaker 1 | 34:02.970
If you don’t know, tell them to try it. Yep.
Speaker 0 | 34:05.411
And one, we’re having to send everyone, like, all right, I’m going to try one more thing and then otherwise. And I did the most simplest of IT solutions.
Speaker 1 | 34:14.857
Shut up.
Speaker 0 | 34:15.317
I turned it on again.
Speaker 1 | 34:16.858
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 0 | 34:17.338
And they came back. And as soon as I did it, I’m like, we’re back, we’re back. And they went running out. They were about to send everybody home and they came out running and said, nope, stop, stop, we’re good, everything’s back.
Speaker 1 | 34:29.725
So. so then you’re like hey uh by the way your moment but you’re like here’s a bye remember that uh remember that plan that i sent you that i needed the money approved for yeah this is why yeah like this is why we’re upgrading the network capabilities here of almost everything so yeah see sometimes in the right place sometimes you just need to be in the right place at the right time to get everything sold for you
Speaker 0 | 34:53.502
Well, there was a question of, you know, when I started, and I’m based in our corporate headquarters in Portland, and originally all of the IT staff was in Utah, and they had nobody on site in Portland. And they’re like, well, do we really need somebody on site in Utah? They didn’t have everybody in Portland. And me being down there, I was like, obviously, we need somebody down there, because if something like this happens, we need somebody there to fix it. And during our interview process to find someone on site, that was… really the hardest part was finding somebody who was willing to come and work site. And you can feel it’s like, well, I’ll come down one day. And it’s like, no, this is manufacturing. You have to be on site. Machines go down. You have to be here to fix it. If you can’t remote into everything, you know, these machines are on networks because it’s still running windows XP, because that’s the only thing that’s, you know, program will run on because, you know, it’s a $50,000 piece of equipment. So. Those are some of the things with manufacturing that people, you know, you don’t think about. And having come from construction, it was something that I hadn’t thought about, but I got done right in the deep end.
Speaker 1 | 36:02.200
I think everyone can relate to that. I think everyone listening to that story felt a level of anxiety. I feel I literally could feel the anxiety. I could feel the people behind me and their eyes like lasers burning through my back whilst I’m staring at a switch. You can feel the pressure. You can feel the, Oh my gosh. I’m like almost going to laugh. I’m almost going to laugh. It’s that uncomfortable. One of my kids uncomfortably laughs and smiles like when he’s in trouble or something happened, you know, and it just makes everything worse. You’re like, why are you smiling? You know, some kids just have that. Like, like it’s like a.
Speaker 0 | 36:49.534
psychological thing like they just like smile they don’t mean to it’s like an uncomfortable like thing but that would be i i’m an uncomfortable laugh i make really bad horrible jokes when i’m uncomfortable which is appropriate so something
Speaker 1 | 37:05.248
to make the situation worse but i cope with it well i’m sure you guys are glad you hired me right now yeah aren’t you glad i’m here I hope you had, I hope you had like a really good excuse for when it came back up. Like, yeah, no, I knew, you know, the turning it off and turning, did they know like all you did was repower it off and power it back on?
Speaker 0 | 37:28.223
Uh, I usually, if it’s something like that, I get called voodoo. So it’s like I use voodoo. So how it’s all could be, if it were, it would be, well, it was working before you got here. It’s like voodoo, man. That’s what does it every time.
Speaker 1 | 37:43.829
Oh. Oh Man someone looked at the switch sideways Yeah, it’s real the That was a good story really was Have you replaced that switch? I shouldn’t have been in a session I was gonna say you’re gonna get calls. Hey, by the way, I heard you had a busted-down switch We can get that there right now. What’s it gonna take? we’re actually doing a major network overhaul and so that’s in progress right now good is there a backup switch is there is there a hot standby is there like you know yeah it just has to be course you found the one look for the cost of 50 goggles you guys have expensive goggles expensive for the cost of 50 goggles darn it yep
Speaker 0 | 38:45.110
have you seen the new ones we just came out with this year the custom 3d printed ones no no so we now do a custom 3d printed goggle where you take a scan of your face and we will 3d print your goggles custom and send it to you that’s pretty sweet it’s pretty sweet and that was one of the projects that you know i was all part of as well so you know i was working with the teams about getting all those you know where are we gonna you know Where are we going to be hosting files?
Speaker 1 | 39:16.151
Where are we going to be active?
Speaker 0 | 39:16.911
I should make,
Speaker 1 | 39:17.531
you know what? I think surfers do it. I gave up skiing a while back because it’s too expensive to have too many kids. And to get them all into skiing would be, it would just be dumb. The, you know, eight kids, like lift tickets and season passes and growing out of skis and, you know, lessons and the commute. So I just took up surfing and winter surfing. So all you got to do is buy a winter wetsuit and a surfboard and you’re good. But on the days where it’s snowing like crazy out there in the water and the wind is blowing And the right set of goggles would be Probably be very healthy. I don’t know if it would work with water and everything fog factor Something to something to keep in mind Smith
Speaker 0 | 40:01.148
You know and a lot of people need this very you know are in it because they are here Every big steer and snowboarder like Perfect. They’re looking at them.
Speaker 1 | 40:14.857
They have they have like the goggle burn. Have you ever seen the goggle burn? You’re like totally like your face is all red and then there’s like this white goggle circle they’re looking at you with a goggle and we’re like do you look in the mirror do you look yeah i told i go i go i wear a lot of sunglasses you know look i’ll wear goggles and that you should wear goggles with the beard just around just around the shop you know that would be cool i was telling my fiance i was gonna wear them for yard work so i’ll do an advertisement for you guys we’ll advertise on the show i want a pair of goggles Send me a pair of goggles. You know what I mean? I’ll change my profile picture. I’ll change my profile picture on LinkedIn to wearing a pair of Smith goggles, okay? We’ll put, you know, we got to put a nerd across the top or something, you know. That’s outstanding. I lived in Colorado for quite a long time, so I’ve seen the goggle burns. I’ve, you know, driven up the pass and stopped at many a gas station or a rental snowboard place where there’s kids with the goggle burns.
Speaker 0 | 41:16.896
they just went to colorado and never came home and made it like a lifestyle forever i i knew a few of those when i moved out there was people who moved out there and just never came back yeah so this has been an absolute pleasure i need to ask you you
Speaker 1 | 41:34.508
know you have a couple other things you have mental health on your profile as something that’s important that we don’t talk openly about that often and i would imagine is something that can happen in i.t people get burned out people get just in general people have things going on in life and we never really take the chance to connect with people and make sure a everything is going okay with them because we’re so die hard business in america sometimes what’s your just i don’t know why do you have that on your profile so i was diagnosed with it
Speaker 0 | 42:09.524
depression in my early 20s in college and later with generalized anxiety disorder and not knowing until later on that my attention deficit disorder that I was diagnosed with as a younger child was also considered a mental health condition and part of it was one there was always a stigma of you don’t talk about it you don’t let people know but there was many times where it was the you know just the generalized depression of not you know trying to get up and get through your day just you know people saying you know we’ll just get over it but it’s you know do you tell someone with a broken arm to just get over it you know it’s it’s a it’s a legitimate condition that’s something we deal with is something i go through every day and i think it’s by having it out there it’s the only way we’re going to get it to be more recognized and accepted as part of a something that you know people deal with all the time and you know you know it’s it’s an illness it’s something that i have but i also want it out there as it’s a it’s something i have but it’s also not saying it’s going to completely define everything that i do it’s a part of who i am it makes me who i am but i want to help others who do have it and know that you can’t have a highly functioning life you can do things and if you need to reach out and talk to other people who are going through the same things i can be an ally yeah
Speaker 1 | 43:35.737
if you’ve never had if you’ve never experienced a chemical even a chemical depression i don’t mean like self like an imbalance or a chemical imbalance you can’t understand why why am i ruminating over something or why am i just continuously turning this past thing over and over again in my head over and over again for months why and it’s unshakable you know like you’ve never experienced that someone just telling you like dude just
Speaker 0 | 44:09.600
just be happy like just change it like give up forget about it like you know that it just doesn’t work like that people don’t get that it’s i think it’s also you know one of the things it was as i was trying you know explaining it to my family and my mom said that you know well i didn’t know you were sad and i said no no sad is emotion i’m thick that’s the difference you know i have a i have a medical condition i’m not sad i’m a you know, I have a fantastic being sale, which I love. Got a lot of stuff going for it. I’m not sad. I have the clinical depression. this is something I deal with, you know? And so, you know, it takes work and it’s just, you know, it’s like any other medical condition. And I think it’s something that we put a stigma around that, you know, we don’t talk about our mental health. We don’t talk about burnout. We don’t talk about the stuff we deal with. And, you know, we do say, you know, like I say, we are so work driven and work focused here, but, you know, we do need to take care of ourselves. And I think a lot of, you know, the COVID push also made a lot of the, People saying, I’m going to take better care of myself. You know, I’m not coming to work when I’m sick. You know, there’s mental health days. You know, people made fun of them for a long time. I’m a big advocate for it because there’s some days where I woke up and like, I’m not going to be able to do anything. I’m literally just wasting my company’s money if I come to the office because I’m not going to work on anything because I’m in no condition to be here. So why would I waste my company’s time when… So let me take a personal health day to go through this and maybe tomorrow I will have a better day and I can actually contribute to the company actually be worthwhile.
Speaker 1 | 45:50.019
There’s a lot to that. Just every human being too can be overworked. Every human being can go into some kind of crazy psychosis and like be overworked and you’re not doing yourself or your company any benefit by working 16 hours. I don’t understand why we make some police officers and hospital workers and. People that drive airplanes, what do they call those people? Pilots, you know, work 10 to 12 hour, even plus shifts. Doesn’t make sense to me, especially under high stress situations. Why do we make the people that are under the highest stress situations, the most tired? Makes no sense.
Speaker 0 | 46:30.332
Sometimes you carry your judgment even further.
Speaker 1 | 46:32.413
Yeah, it’s crazy to me. Not that this, you know, this really has nothing to do with IT other than that IT can be. pretty can burn you out especially if you’re looking at a switch that went down and you got dumped by the old crew and they disappeared on you and now you’re short-staffed and the switch went down and the whole company is looking at you you’re like i’m just not going to come into work today exactly um what’s helped what just last question what’s helped the most In life, just in general, what’s helped the most? Yeah. Like just, you know, mental health. What, is there any, like anything that’s just helped?
Speaker 0 | 47:18.738
Therapy and antidepressants definitely help. And, you know, talk to a doctor. That’s definitely something, you know, if you were feeling it, you know, don’t hide from it, address it, deal with it. Those are the things there. It’s, it’s not something you can hide from. It’s going to be there. I was with a previous medical group where I was reading through my notes and they had it written down to like depression cure. And I was like, you’re funny. That doesn’t that doesn’t happen. It can be in remission. It can, you know, it can be, you know, but it will come back, you know, and I’ve come to the point where I can I can now identify some of the signs where I might feel an episode coming on. But, you know, it’s. you talk through it, you find out what’s going on. Is there a trigger? Is there something going on? And, you know, there’s, there’s, you know, a lot of potential things that could, you know, there’s causes for it, you know, nature, biology, there’s a lot of thoughts that, you know, as a former athlete, I do believe there’s potentially some CTE that could have been in there. You know, I had CTE, the head trauma.
Speaker 1 | 48:32.815
Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 0 | 48:35.844
Yeah. So I seem to have my brain studied when I pass to see if there is anything there just because I don’t understand what’s going on. And if that’s the cause of it, then, you know, we need to understand what’s going on. You know, you know, if concussions are the reason that I have depression, then I understand why.
Speaker 1 | 48:53.573
So what about, um, just curious, what about hormone levels and stuff like that? Have you ever had that checked?
Speaker 0 | 49:00.296
I’ve had a lot of boat work. So I was actually diagnosed with thyroid cancer three years ago. And so they did a lot of hormone testing and checking with those. And so I’m actually on thyroid cancer free for three years now. And so they caught that because I was in a car accident and they did a CT scan. And that was the only reason they found it.
Speaker 1 | 49:21.404
That’s crazy. That happened to my father. That’s how they found his cancer too. He tripped and hit his head on the brick wall. Then they’re like, your head’s okay, but you have cancer.
Speaker 0 | 49:30.428
Yeah. Yeah. So it was one of those weird fluke things, but it was hard. I’ve gone through all the panels and everything and things have looked good, but it’s fair, but it’s been a good.
Speaker 1 | 49:45.632
period i haven’t had any major episodes in a while so i think having a career that i enjoy which i will i will say i have not had a major episode since i’ve had since i made the switch just to share um i had severe anxiety growing up like severe like just just let me hide in my room like anxiety like really really just not i don’t know what it was i don’t know if it was you know, just experiences growing up or anything. I remember high school being miserable. And then for some reason, senior year or something clicked, maybe it was like hormones or something like that. And then I remember pretty much all the way through my twenties and mid twenties and everything, just being pretty much miserable and, but high performer, you know, anxiety type of thing, able to always highly perform at work. Because sometimes when you go to work, it’s just like, you know, if you execute and you execute really, really well, you can do that. I don’t know what that means. And it sounds stupid, but I was listening to like Tony Robbins and like other motivational speakers. And this is what most of the, like when you, when you have most of the mental health people say like, you know, like you can’t just say like snap out of it. Right. And that’s pretty much like what a lot of the, I’m not saying that Tony Robbins says it, but he talks a lot about, you know, how you talk, how yourself, what yourself talk is, how you look at yourself, what’s your reality is not actual real reality. And, you know, choose your words. Zig Ziglar saying quit your stinking thinking and all that stuff and that made like a massive difference in my life and everything was like I went from like like really like Confronting anxiety head-on and like putting myself in even worse Situations like go into like the highest anxiety position you could put yourself in right and just like you know Deal with it and deal with the uncomfortable factor and that eliminate a lot of that but then I had a weird like hormone imbalance like a couple years ago and it put me into like a really weird like deep depression that I couldn’t shake and I realized at that point it was a chemical thing. I realized at that point like no matter what like all the old techniques all the things that I had tried all of the you know just you know trying to get everything out on paper and and organize your life and get everything in line and you know tell yourself that you know this reality that you’re seeing is is you know a farce and it’s not real and you know you have all these you know attitude of gratitude and all this nah didn’t work did not work it was just like stuck right and until that chemical imbalance got like altered or fixed i couldn’t you know i just i don’t know what it was you
Speaker 0 | 52:33.832
it was almost like it was like this is your reality i don’t know if that’s at all you can relate with that i don’t know no i definitely can i i think that’s the you know where my the antidepressants help with my chemical imbalance in there i i can tell when i wasn’t on them versus when i was and i’ve been on them for a number of years now and it’s you know it’s routine it’s part of my my daily you know when i have my vitamins in the mornings i have my antidepressants well to the point i joke that they are my vitamins um and you know it’s it helps keep you know that imbalance in place and you know that is a lot of part of it is the chemical imbalances within your brain and you know i i saw a thing online and you know it is a little bit you know again me making appropriate jokes but with the they said that anxiety is merely a conspiracy theory against yourself um you know it’s true it’s it’s true you know it totally is man that’s like that’s probably one of the most accurate ways i’ve ever heard it stated yeah you just you know and that’s and for and when you if you look at it that way you get certain things like okay well why am i thinking like that you know and and there are ways to help control it and things like that but ultimately what i have found is that you know there’s some things that are beyond your control and sometimes you have to ask for extra help and you have to ask for a doctor doctor, or you have to get, you know, you need a medication to help you through some of it because you don’t know what to do. And that’s the depending on other people thing that I brought up before.
Speaker 1 | 54:13.991
Well, thank you for being vulnerable. Thank you for sharing. I really appreciate that. And it has been outstanding having you on the show.
Speaker 0 | 54:24.839
Thank you. I appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure to be on here.
Speaker 1 | 54:27.921
Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. If you like this or any other episode, make sure you rate it and share it with one of your friends. And remember, when it comes to IT, you always need to be dissecting, analyzing, and improving.
