It’s been a while. Well, it’s actually only been a month, but it felt like a long month. My July was absolutely packed; I accomplished more in just a few weeks than I have in several years, so let’s talk about everything I’ve done since we last caught up. From hiking a mountain in Colorado to passing exams here in Kansas City, I feel like a totally different person than I was when I released my last post! Amidst all this, I was reading John Gwynne’s The Hunger of the Gods, so I’ll be giving some of my spoiler-free thoughts on that book in this post, too.

Over the last three weeks, I gave you a full deep dive into my IT career history. I talked about my first job, my current job, and everything in between! I was as honest and thorough as I could be (probably more honest and thorough than I should have been), but now I’m going to look a little bit deeper and provide you with a few lessons that I’ve learned from navigating my IT career and the professional space. I figure that if I’ve devoted this much time to a career, I might as well try my best to help others who are looking into the same thing.

Last Friday, I released a post that was essentially the introductory post about my IT career. I talked about getting my start and the first couple of jobs that I had in this field, beginning with my first data center job all the way to leaving my third IT job, which was another data center in Kansas City. Today, I’ll be continuing the walkthrough of my history in IT with the next four jobs that I had, which are going to come with some… interesting stories, particularly a couple of the jobs. The most interesting of all of them is actually going to be the first job I’m talking about today: working for an insurance company’s data center. It was… something.

Today, I thought it would be fun to share my personal IT career journey and talk about how it started and how I got where I am. This is going to be split into two parts since there’s a lot to go through. My hope is that by being thorough and open about this, I can show others that it’s entirely possible to build a career in a field like IT and support yourself without the need for a degree that you don’t actually want or care about.

In this article, I talk about two real-life managers (nicknamed Bill Camelot of Serpent Ranch and Moe Gas of Infoline) who got away with violence and misconduct thanks to an easily-manipulated system.

Why are uniforms and dress codes such a big deal? It’s just clothing, right? And you only have to wear it for a maximum of eight hours a day, don’t you? So why on earth would I be adding uniforms and dress codes to this series on why your job sucks? Well, buckle up, because there are going to be quite a few examples in this one and no uniform/dress code-enforcing employer is going to be happy with this article.