Chapter 2

     I had a double blessing. I was the first born and male. I got to be the big brother to my siblings and someone my mother could count on. Over time I became her confidant, baby sitter and I hope someone she could trust. In the meantime on Devon Ave. Farber's Bakery became a success.  That brought with it expectations that I'd succeed in all things unlike my dad. In school I needed to be the best, in sports the best and balance that all with working at the bakery. That was no problem until college. My second semester my grades and attention slipped and continued until I had to leave college. Around that time my father died in a VA hospital in North Chicago, With him gone  no one ran the bakery back end and eventually my mother closed it. I had taken over a computer store in Skokie and was not adv well by the CPA and lawyer my mother had used in the bakery. I took on a store with a crippling debt and useless inventory, purchase with my inheritance, my mother's money and my father's mother's money. Over 17 years I ran that store with my mother as the bookkeeper and and a few of the previous staff. Personal computers became widespread through business and homes. The prices plummeted in sync with Moore's Law and I had to sell more and more systems to keep the doors open. I finally saw that the service side of he business was where the money was ( I'd been giving that away to my customers) but it was too late. I had to fire my staff, stiff my mother and closed the door. 

    I'd been selling Novell to my business clients and in some cases been their network admin. It turned out that I'd answered and ad for a network admin at a small association in the Loop. I met with the IT director, and he asked me a few Novell and network related question. I must have passed since he hired me that day and I was hired as Manager System Support. I reported to him and was part of a small IT staff. My coworkers were a DBA and his assistant, a Webmaster, a woman who supports MS Office apps and myself.  As I get into my cubical, they came up and introduced themselves. I checked out my computer, it's configuration and the computer room. We were in the Seaballoningrs Tower ( now the Willis tower ) and the computer rooms and office were from a failed MSP. We had a 4 port rack, with labelled patch panel ports. Each wall jack was also labelled and had 2 RJ-45 jacks, one red and one blue. The red was the main jack and the blue was the backup to be used in case of a cable failure. It had  battery backup and a heavy rack of car batteries that supplied power in case we lost power. We has 12 USR 19.2K baud modems that were connected to a modem server and then to CompuServe. That gave us a combined total pipe speed of 230.4 KB to be shared among 125 workstations and around 8 Novell, Windows and BSD Unix server. The BSD server ran Sage Accounting, The NT 3.5 servers ran Exchange and SQL for the MS SQL AI membership program (AIMS) and Novell did file and print. The workstations ran Windows 95/97 with the Microsoft Novell client. It worked but both internet and network speed was slow. Network speed was an easy fix since the network was using hugs. I order some Dell managed switches that were on special and replaced them over the weekend. There was also a push to go to Exchange and Windows. I didn't know anything about Windows server other than it was less advanced at the time then Novell server , less stable and slower on the same hardware. 

    I then developed a brain abscess, almost died and underwent surgery to install a shunt to drain the abscess. . A piece of my skull was removed, the shunt installed and I went to rehab. In rehab I learned to walk again, use my hands and do fine motor skill test and had my cognitive abilities tested. I had some balance issues, minor memory loss and spent more time on the hospital. I got impatient to get back to work not understanding anything about my condition. I was wobbly when I got out of bed, fell occasionally and tired easily. With more rehab I could walk with a walker but with balance issues that I'll have the rest of my life. I also started to gain weight, eventually ballooning to 360lbs. At 5'10" my BMI was "morbidly obese ". However I could walk unaided, stand without falling and my intellect seemed unaffected. It was all good except for the no job no BS and my weight. So I decided to got to to University of Illinois Circle Campus. They had a program to transfer to them for graduates of Oakton Community College who had gotten and AAS in Computer Networking. I made an appointment to view their webinar and then make an appointment with a counselor. The next sessions were later in the year so I made a note in Google Calendar to ping me when I could talk to the person and pick out my courses. I hoped I could arrange to self pay at the same time. Since had been a mid level manager and had my 401K invested in an index fund I could pay for the whole degree if possible. 

 With each paycheck and raise my self esteem and confidence grew. They started me at 40K and over the years my salary and responsibility grew. I got bored and started to walk around the loop. I was salaried and had a pager and competent staff. I got bored and asked power users about their needs to get new projects started, run by Legal and Accounting and approved by the CEO. That's  how I learned about a need that our publishing department had. Authors had to  send in manuscripts, have them proofread and approved. They were then mailed back to the authors to modify. This took months of back and forth through the USPO. It was expensive. Sometime the markets or laws changed causing the book to be scrapped and then having to go through the time and expense to do it again. I did research and read about cloud storage and Dropbox the market leader. It looks go but lacking in some ways. I found Box and they seemed to have looked at these deficiencies and fixed them. Now the departments choud have Box storage boxes. generate a URL for those boxes and email the URL's to the authors. Permissions and rights could be assigned and activity generated emails to all parties when updates, uploads, and download occurred.  It was less expensive the cloud storage was cheaper and Box technical  support was eager to add features or fix issues that popped up. At 87 users out of 125 users we were were a major account for them at the time and they made us Premier Partners. 

 It was at this time that I walked into the office library and talked to the Head Librarian. He was having problem with his computer and wanted to discuss possible online expansion. During the discussion he complimented me  on my work and said I was probably the best hire they'd made.  My head got big and I did and said some things I shouldn't have and I was fired. I did get a nice severance package though and that was that. 

From there I sunk into depression and spent a year in our basement eating and listening to NPR. I finally got my act together and a recruiter found me a job at an MSP All Covered.