Um. If you are on the helpdesk - unjamming printers and unfreezing outlook is your job. Your work isn't being interrupted every five minutes, but rather you are being called on to do your job every five minutes.
To be fair, in a 200 person shop, he may also be expected to do sysadmin duties as well as helpdesk. It tends to get lumped together a lot. But even as a sysadmin, your job is ultimately to serve the company and it's clients, and in a small to midsize company, that means rebooting the boss' PC every now and then. Try to take pride in the fact that you tangibly made his life slightly better.
My role in a similarly sized company is basically sysadmin without the title, so I feel for you. There are days I'd love to play with the tech and roll out cool things, and it does get annoying to handle the level 2 stuff (fortunately, I have a part-time helpdesk guy for the basics).
One tip would be to get an intern, and dump some of the support tickets on them. Honestly, I'm not sure how viable a solution that is (I'd be eager to hear others experiences), because I don't know if a CS person will want an internship like that. But maybe someone from a business background would be intrigued; you likely touch every part of the business, and there could be appeal there.
If you're interested in web development, heck, just do it! Do your own site. Do your friends' sites, though set some clear boundaries. This will get you estimating experience, and you can play with whatever strikes your fancy. Then hit up some local small businesses and do their sites. Use that experience to get your next job. A CS Masters seems like overkill for web development. I can't say I know one, but then again, see my second paragraph.
The last thing I'd suggest is to get yourself involved on larger projects in the company. I don't always think to ask my helpdesk guy to help out, but I'm glad when he volunteers. This is a way to learn the tech, the business, and all those fuzzy skills that we don't think should matter but really, really do.
HTH,
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Yes, I imagine it's fantastically expensive to get started with the cell tower infrastructure. And yes, as soon as they become a network, Apple won't have too many mobile partners anymore.
On the other hand, Apple loves selling the whole widget. And they certainly wouldn't mind the margins on SMS. And they have a big pile of money in the bank. And they must have some decent infrastructure to handle selling the music and apps.
I'm completely ignorant on the details, but I wonder if the expiration of the AT&T exclusivity doesn't mean doesn't mean they hop to Verizon, but try to do it themselves. In theory, they could even make the iPhone 8 Xtreme hop to 802.11(x) networks. Imagine if all those Apple Base Stations got turned into microcells in a software update.
So are these crazy ramblings? Well, yes.
I'm honestly not sure how much I can say without violating NDA, but from an IT standpoint, it's pretty straightforward if you have IT staff. If you don't, then you should look into some sort of sharing/hosting arrangement.
I'm not sure how it would work if you were a social agency, though. Tessitura shines with it's ticketing integration, but that won't help much if you run, say, a women's shelter.
Good luck,
CC
Original submitter here. It seems the root link to the the author's blog is gone, though it's in the firehose submission:
http://www.blog.montgomerie.net/whither-eucalyptus
He's posting his entire dealings with Apple, mostly of the form letter variety. Hope this app nonsense gets cleared up soon.
CC
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