Eager Beaver

I wanted to drop in today and tell you a quick story about (long ago) my being the eager, new guy in IT and how a manager handled my extreme over-zealousness.  Perhaps someone out there can draw some inspiration from it, whether you’re the new guy or the manager/team-lead with a new guy.

So as advertised, I was the energetic lad trying to prove myself.  Very first IT job.

I was SO excited to be in my first IT job.  For years I had been in computer-aided drafting and was transitioning to IT (IS back then) to do PC support and AutoCAD training.  The manager and I were going to lunch to discuss my future role on the team and how this transition would work.  The team at that point consisted of just him and another guy, both of who I viewed back then as minor-gods.  I was the new blood and very unproven, being given a shot to switch careers and grab the brass-nerd-ring.

I remember on the way to that lunch, I was babbling to my shiny new manager while he drove, providing just a stream of consciousness to him.  It was like everything I’d ever read was coming back to me, and I was sharing it all baby, bouncing from topic to semi-related topic, like a Google search gone wild.

In about 2 minutes I had drained the energy from his remaining soul (he’d been in IT for some time and I was BRAND new).  Looking back on it, I think I actually saw him deflating and the light going out of his eyes but I simply couldn’t stop talking.

I “just knew” this was great stuff that I was sharing.  He would be so impressed with this gem of a person on his team.  Yes not just someone that they were giving a chance to but, wonder of wonders, unbeknownst to them, someone who really did have some actual technical knowledge.

I had to share it all I tell you!  How excited he’d be when he found out about the technological terror that was now his to command!  The power, the geek-glory!

So you can see where my head was at.  Ahem.

Suddenly while at a stop light, he held up his hand in my face which ceased my incessant road-runner-speed-speech and said, “I can see you’re excited and you clearly already know some things but you need to .. calm .. down.”

That was it.  But it’s a lesson I’ll never forget.

And to this day, I respect that manager for giving me that pause and helping me focus. It showed me I was accepted, which is what my babbling was trying to do (prove I was “good enough”) and that acceptance made me feel part of my first team.   Suddenly it wasn’t me trying to fit in but it was the team moving forward to carry out a goal.

Everybody needs to be on a team like that at least once in their career.

To this day it’s one of the best lessons I’ve learned in IT.  In days when things are getting stressful, sometimes I still think about what he said and it helps me focus.

I look back at what I’ve written here and it proves I’m still not as good as Chris, that manager.  It took me many more words to teach that lesson here than it took him to teach it to me.

He used one simple sentence and one simple action to show me something which helped shape my career.

WCO, you’re still taking me to school.