Today marks the end of my journey as an IT Professional.

It started about 31 years ago, full time and a few years before that as a part-time tech support agent. It ends today after just over 4 years at the largest IT Consulting Firm on the planet, IBM.

I started working at Vaxxine Computer Systems in Jordan, Ontario back in the early 90s somewhere, right when the internet was taking off. Do you remember those days? Not unless you’re in your 50s or older. Vaxxine had a T1 line, 1.54mbps that it shared with hundreds of dial-up users. The fastest connection to dial in at the time was a 28.8k dial-up modem. For those of us who started with 1200bps modems, 28.8 seemed blazingly fast.

I worked there until 2001 when I decided that was enough of phone support. It was not a good job, I did not make good money. When I finished my tour, I was making $16 per hour, or $32000 per year. I was barely scraping by, TBH. There was also the fact that we were paid monthly, that was tough. I was always out of money after all my bills were paid. It sucked.

I moved over to the Regional Municipality of Niagara, the Regional Government as an IT Support Technician. I did make better money for sure and was there for 10.5 years. By the end, I was making around $51,000 per year. Decent, for sure. Working for the Government sucked though. In general, the people were lazy, protected by the Union and the waste of money was staggering.

I quit the Region of Niagara without another job to go to. I didn’t think the job market was all that bad, but it was. It took ages to get an interview and then I was offered a job as an inbound IT Support person at a call center. I declined the job and thought that there must be something better than that. Turns out, there was.

On the Thursday before the Easter long weekend in 2012, I was offered a job in Calgary, Alberta as a Support Technician for BDO, working for the National office in Toronto but physically in Calgary. I jumped at the opportunity and packed my bags and a trailer and made the trek across the country with my two dogs, Zeus and Blondie and my sister came along to help as well. I called it our “Vacation across the country” and she’d counter that it was NO vacation. She helped me get settled and within a week (likely hours) of arriving in Calgary, I was in love.

The job was great. I enjoyed it and I was progressing. I ended up being the Incident Management Coordinator, handling the firms major IT issues across the country. It required OT and on-call time as well. On top of that, I handled ticket escalations and assigned work to the L2 and L3 teams. It was pseudo management, no one reported to me, but I assigned them work, probably helped my ego.

I was terminated without cause and given a decent severance.

I was out of work for almost a year before I landed my current job at IBM, International Business Machines, the largest IT Firm on the planet. I started out as a Team Lead, a Manager with a team of 12 agents reporting to me. My client was indeed, the job finding firm. It lasted just over a year until indeed didn’t rewew their contract with IBM. I then moved into a Lead job with a larger team (16 agents) for Palo Alto, a networking and security firm. I was there until March of 2024.

I then was assigned to “The Bench” where I was paid to do training. At the last minute, I was snapped up by the Infrastructure side and made a System Administrator for our client, Airbus. Yes, the airplane manufacturer. After that ended, I was and am for the next hour or so, back on the bench again.

This time, there is no 11th hour repreive and I will shortly be separated from IBM, again, without cause.

So, comes the end of my career in IT. It’s been about a 35 year run between full time and part time. It’s mostly been enjoyable.

I’d like to thank some people, I will only use initals for them

Vaxxine Computer Systems – RK

Region of Niagara – AA, JH, TM, RS

BDO – CR, PB, KW

IBM – BL, DH, TB

I hope I haven’t missed anyone and I hope if they do read this, they recognize themselves and how they helped. I couldn’t have done it without and wouldn’t have wanted to.

For now, I will take some time to reflect. Carry on.