WARNING: This post is rather philosophical. Not sure how it turned out this way, but it did.
A few days ago, I was in San Jose for VON. We stayed downtown at The Fairmont. Nice place. Anyway, as I wandered about on foot, I started recalling other time spent there over a decade ago when after graduating from college I went to work for MFS Network Technologies. My first job (which lasted perhaps 6 months) was as a Point-of-Presence (PoP) Engineer. I was responsible for “designing” PoP rooms for MFS’s network (Inside Plant) as well as figuring out how to connect the PoP to the fiber backbone (Outside Plant). Pretty basic in terms of engineering work when you consider it in the larger context of a telecom network, but I was nonetheless clueless and woefully under trained. I was a Mechanical Engineering major with my only real-world experience coming in the form of some internships in a manufacturing facility and a part-time job as a CAD draftsman. Not exactly construction / project management experience.
Anyway, I asked a lot of questions and faked my way through it until I was rescued via a battlefield promotion (you know, someone departs and you’re lucky enough / stupid enough to take the gig… “I need a corporal. You’re it, until you’re dead or I find someone better.”). But that’s another story. The reason I was reminiscing in San Jose was because of all the buildings I had connected to the network that first summer out of school. 55 S Almaden, 55 S Market, 50 San Fernando and the list goes on. “Big, shiny buildings” were the primary target for MFS. The theory went that if it was a Class A or Class B property, there was probably someone in it that would like to buy some Private Line transport services from someone other than PacBell.
I lost weekends and nights trying to get those buildings on-line because the City wouldn’t let us tear up the street to lay the fiber and impact traffic during the day. At the time, I didn’t really mind the sacrifice and I still work a lot of evenings and weekends, but it’s different now because it’s for ME, not for someone else. And therein lays the value of reminiscing. For the unromantic (like me), reminiscing can be viewed as hindsight, lessons learned, knowledge gained. I appreciate what I did, what I learned and the value created. I wouldn’t really care to do it all over again, but without those experiences, I wouldn’t appreciate the experiences I’m gaining now and perhaps I wouldn’t even be able to do what I’m doing now.
