I'm still there. It's been over a year, now. I struggle with some things, still. I'm the youngest there, by a good 4 years, but was inducted directly into their action team, instead of the helpdesk. My boss is one of the best people I've ever worked under. I still do some of the helldesk-type work - customer support, building workstations, etc, but we all do. I'm nowhere near as hands-on with the serious work and servers as much as I'd like to be, but I've done a fantastic job almost every time that kind of work gets thrown at me. My old boss, the college netadmin, invited me up to shadow the installation of their new SAN, and advised me to interview with the vendor that installed it. I did so, before the installation even happened, and they said that all I was lacking was the experience.

And all this time, I've never lost the enjoyment of learning new things, playing with bigger and better systems, moving up. I'll settle eventually. That vendor pays their engineers well over double what I'm making now, and the mere concept of a SAN is cool as fuck - I didn't even know that "External mini-SAS" was a thing! Holy fuck, what is fiber "fabric switching"? It sounds awesome! It's the same sense of awe that I had when I threw together my budget build gaming desktop four years ago and saw it POST for the first time (and subsequently fail to boot, because the optical drive was borked).

So I'll move on. Master something, and move up. I like the MSP, despite the pay, and I'm still going to sea - which makes up for the pay, good pay + not having living expenses (except for alcohol in port) really builds up a bank account, and I'm about to pay off one of my student loans in full. I'm learning powershell. I'm highly interested in *nix stuff, although it's not relevant where I work. Networking is nifty. Storage is the shit. As my beard slowly grows out, I keep learning, and I'm enthralled with it all. My home lab keeps growing - just hit 3 servers, and I taught myself my way around ESXi on them. It's all so goddamn fun. Sometimes I plateau and work gets me down for a few weeks, but then I find something else to dig my claws into, and it's the same joy and wonderment all over again as I grokk it. And it's not just the learning process, either. Don't mistake me for someone addicted to study or certs, because I'm not - I don't even have any certs yet. I just fucking love it all, and it would take all the lusers in the world to take that away from me.