Being the IT Guy

While I want to quickly and decisively move away from being “The IT Guy” in my career, I must admit that at some level I fear losing that control over my own workplace destiny that is wielded by that position. I’d consider it grounds to quit were I forced to use IE, for example.

There’s this odd dance of anti-user/pro-user tactics that your standard IT manager has to deal with. To the extent that the IT guy is trying to be a conscientious coworker, s/he wants to fulfill the needs of their users and not constrain them. On the other hand, users have this predilection to do really really horrible things like getting viruses, disconnecting important network drives, and erasing mission-critical files; all of which inspire a deep desire among those of us whose core job it is to keep things running to lock everything down and put the kid gloves on the users.

This is backwards, though.