The Journey of Learning My First Programming Language: From a Help Desk Technician to a Programmer

Shortly after I got married, I realized that my beloved wife might want to eat on occasion, and if this was to happen frequently, I would need to get a job.

Planning was never my strong suit, however. After the honeymoon, we made a brief stop in a small town near Birmingham, Alabama. There, I picked up a weekly jobs-posting newsletter. Although there weren't many technology-related jobs listed, I spotted a posting for a Level 1 Help Desk Technician.

What followed was a series of fortunate events. Being quite handy with a screwdriver and having a calming personality, I faxed my resume and waited. Punctuated by a call on Monday morning, they were interested in scheduling an interview, and two days later, I was hired as the newest Help Desk Technician at a hardware distributor!

Typically, when people think of 'hardware' and 'computers,' they imagine video cards or hard drives. However, this was not the case. We didn't sell electronics. Instead, we were a hardware store that catered to the needs of local hardware stores, supplying them with tools and equipment. Software, however, was a necessary tool for them to manage their inventory and sales. This software was developed by an in-house programming department, and, you guessed it, me.

I was essentially IT Support for people who sold hammers for fifty years. Despite the stigma of working with physical tools, I enjoyed helping people, even if some couldn't differentiate between an icon of a computer and a TV. It was a unique and fun challenge!

The only part of my job that genuinely frightened me was logging tapes into the mainframe. I wasn't comfortable with things I didn't understand, and this six-step process was completely baffling. From where the tapes came to what the numbers meant and where they went, it was an overwhelming task. I grew to dread it and feared making mistakes without knowing the impact of my actions.

Determined to solve this issue, I sat down with my boss and suggested to him, "You know what’s really good at automating tedious repetitive processes? Computers. Could you task one of the programmers to write a quick program to handle the tape stuff on the mainframe?"

To my surprise, he responded, "When did you learn how to speak in bold and italic?"

What he was really saying was, "Congratulations. You’re a programmer now! Don't let it interfere with your help desk duties…" He then handed me a copy of Visual Basic 6 and sent me on my way.

Emboldened by the idea of learning something new, I installed the software and quickly got up to speed with the internet. Within a couple of days, I had transformed the long, tedious manual process into a short, painless, mostly automated one!

To this day, if I don't know how to do something, I write a program to do it for me. It might not improve my understanding of the process, but it ensures that I don't have to think about it anymore!