I agree with you that people of ordinary skills can choose to apply themselves and succeed in most endeavors. And if they enjoy doing it, they will probably be fulfilled. My point was simply that being good at something doesn't mean you will be happy doing it. As your post illustrates.

I wouldn't agree with your statement about aptitude, though. I hope you would agree that possessing adequacy is quite different from virtuosity. You can achieve mastery either way, but the former is more work.

Hear, hear. I was going to say something like that, leaving out the being female part of course. If you don't love what you do, then no amount of aptitude will be truly satisfying. That's why my SO went into software development after getting a science PhD.

"no IT, no network for your macs"

My original comment was meant in jest, but I want to respond to this. Macs have been networkable since 1984; no OS networks more easily. My house had 6 networked Macs with shared printers in 1995.

TCP/IP networking is harder than Mac-only (i.e., AppleTalk or Rendezvous/Bonjour), but I don't think it's a big deal. Maybe I've developed a blind spot to it.

I'm not saying network administration is worthless by any means, but a smaller organization, ~50 users, can definitely get by without full-time IT as long as there's one good power user.

"Your suggestion would definitely get rid of the problem of employees wasting their time away web surfing or posting on slashdot instead of working..."

Zing! Thank you for that. I'll meet you at the unemployment office and buy you a beer. ;-)

Your CEO should buy a Mac for everyone in the company and fire the whole IT department.