The Original Plan
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a pilot.
I was never particularly good at things that were easy for me. If something was simple, I tended to lose interest. Give me something difficult, however, and suddenly I cared a lot more.
After finishing school I came across my first Cisco CCNA course in 2014. Something about networking clicked almost immediately. It was complicated enough to be interesting, but logical enough that there was always a reason why something worked — or didn't.
I decided that networking was probably something I wanted to do.
I then proceeded to take a rather long route towards actually doing it.
The Cisco Incident
In 2014, while studying telecommunications at university, I got my first taste of Cisco.
The university offered what was essentially the CCNA curriculum split into four courses. They were taught as regular university classes and counted towards our credits. If you passed all four, however, you did not actually get a CCNA certification. You still had to pay for and take the real exam separately.
There was just one small problem.
There weren't enough students.
The course never made it past the second of the four parts.
2014CISCO CURRICULUM
PARTS AVAILABLE:2/4CERTIFICATION:NOCREDITS:YESSTUDENTS:NOT ENOUGH
The Long Way Around
I started working at T-2 in 2014 as a Help Desk Technician while I was still studying telecommunications at university.
I had about a year left before I would have finished my degree and become a proper engineer. But work was considerably more interesting than university, and I was learning something new every day.
Not necessarily about telecommunications.
Mostly about people.
I learned how to troubleshoot problems that weren't always technical, how to explain complicated things to people who didn't care how they worked, and how to remain remarkably calm while someone explained to me that their internet was broken because their neighbour's Wi-Fi was probably interfering with the moon.
Eventually I decided that I would rather focus on work than finish university.
So I quit.
I also moved from the help desk into a Network Technician role in 2016. Over the following years I took on more responsibility, worked with increasingly complicated network problems and eventually started training new technicians.
I was good at the job.
Then I interviewed for an engineering position at T-2.
I was highly recommended for the position.
I also completely bombed the interview.
It was probably one of the more useful failures I've had.
I realised that while I knew how to do my job extremely well, there were plenty of things I didn't actually understand deeply enough. Practical experience had taken me a long way, but it had also allowed me to skip over a lot of theory.
So I started studying again in my free time.
And, somewhat ironically, I went back to the thing that had started all of this in the first place: Cisco.
CCNA STATUS
COURSE STARTED ........ 2014EXAM TAKEN ............ 2022ATTEMPTS .............. 1RESULT ................ PASS
YES, THAT IS AN EIGHT YEAR GAP.NO, I DON'T HAVE A GOOD EXCUSE.
The Land of Fire and Ice
A few years later, a friend and former coworker moved to Iceland.
In the summer they were having a networking problem. Their usual IT guy was indisposed. My friend suggested that they could put the company in touch with me.
I couldn't actually solve the problem.
However, apparently they liked my ideas anyway.
They told me that if I wanted to come to Iceland, they were willing to help make it happen. My partner and I sat down and talked about it.
What started as a joke gradually became a serious conversation. Then it became a plan.
A few days before moving to Iceland, I finally took the CCNA exam I'd first started preparing for in 2014. I passed it on my first attempt.
In December 2022, I left Slovenia and T-2, moved to Iceland and started working as a Network Engineer.
And somehow, I'm still here.
DECEMBER 2022
LOCATION:SLOVENIA → ICELANDJOB:NETWORK TECHNICIAN → NETWORK ENGINEERCCNA:[ PASS ]REGRETS:[ NONE DETECTED ]PLAN:[ STILL UNCLEAR ]
Why I Like This Job
The best part of the job is that it is never really the same job.
One day I'm designing a new PON network with splitters, Google Maps and optimism.
The next I'm dealing with a hotel that has decided it absolutely needs a camera that isn't part of their UniFi system, but really likes the €20 Xiaomi one.
The day after that I'm apparently a sysadmin working on a virtual machine that will change the world — or perhaps just monitor latency. Nobody can ever know the difference.
That's what I like about networking. Eventually everything connects to everything else, and there is always something new to figure out.