swfranklin's Journal: Leaving the IT Field

Here it is, 10 minutes to 10 on Thursday night. I'm at the office, cleaning up my desk and organizing personal items, and making sure my current work is pretty much documented and easy to find. I'm burning a few personal files to CD, and I have a few minutes to kill. Time for my first /. Journal entry!

Tomorrow, at 9:00 AM, the Boss and I have a meeting. He's meeting with everyone on the team individually, to discuss their personal goals for the coming year. He doesn't know it yet, but my personal goal is to not be here. I'm handing in my resignation at the beginning of the meeting.

My wife and I started a small business a couple of years ago, and it's now grown to the point that I need to be there. The Web site needs some reengineering to make it easier to add products, we have new products to develop, and we have a busy summer ahead of us with motorcycle rallies.

I've been in IT for most of my adult life. I started working at Radio Shack in about 1987, and started learning about the PCs we sold at that time. I had used Apple ]['s in High School, and had touched a PC (real, honest-to-G*d IBM with function keys down the left side) a time or two. The 80286 was the latest stuff, and I found that I had a knack for it. Within a couple of years, I had become a Systems Engineer for the Shack, and a few years later was running the IT department for a small (250-user) company.

That was three jobs ago. I moved on to another company (still managing the IT group), got RIFed, contracted for a few months documenting IT processes, and for the last year and a half I have been a programmer.

Basically, I've been in IT now for a good 15 years, and that's ending (as a primary focus of my career) tomorrow. Well, two weeks from tomorrow I guess. I still have a Web site, and a network, and software systems to deal with, and I'll still be "The Man" to deal with them at my company. But, they will be just tools to me now, helping me work toward my primary goal (making a living selling motorcycle accessories). I am rather looking forward to that.

CD is done. Time to go home. I'm still a nerd, right? Can I still read Slashdot even though I'm a Biker Dude? ;-)