Making a Living

Posted by Cyn


What does a Tech­noMom do? In our soci­ety, the ques­tion “What do you do?” is gen­er­ally under­stood to mean “What kind of work do you do for money?” At the moment, my num­ber one job is being a Mommy, and thank­fully I’m able to con­cen­trate on that. I do some occa­sional free­lance work, but I’m largely focused on our fam­ily and home for now. If you really think I’m absolutely the per­son for some­thing you need done, I’ll be happy to talk to you about it, as long as you under­stand up front that I will only work remotely so that I can still be home with my daugh­ter. Take a look at my résumé first, though.

I’ve been a free­lance com­puter con­sul­tant since 1990, occa­sion­ally full-​​time and some­times part-​​time in addi­tion to what­ever else I’m doing. I pro­vide sup­port and train­ing to indi­vid­u­als and small busi­nesses. I help them fig­ure out what hard­ware and soft­ware suits their needs and how best to acquire them. I stopped build­ing hard­ware years ago, as there’s no mar­gin in it any more. I get cus­tomers set up with sys­tems, train them in their use, and pro­vide sup­port and repair for the inevitable prob­lems. In recent years I’ve done some web pub­lish­ing and helped busi­nesses fig­ure out what they want to accom­plish with an inter­net pres­ence and how to reach their goals in a cost-​​effective man­ner. I’ve pro­vided links to some of my favorite resources for end users else­where on this site, so I won’t repro­duce them here.

I enjoy the flex­i­bil­ity I have when self-​​employed, but as just about every­one knows it’s dif­fi­cult for inde­pen­dents to get good health insur­ance and other ben­e­fits typ­i­cally pro­vided by employ­ers under a group plan. And, of course, when you’re self-​​employed you have to be the sales­per­son and the accoun­tant and all those other things that I really pre­fer to leave to some­one who enjoys such things.

I’ve done a vari­ety of things when work­ing for some­one else. At one point I was the IT spe­cial­ist for a soft­ware devel­op­ment com­pany, pro­vid­ing hard­ware and soft­ware sup­port to inter­nal staff and mak­ing Net­ware (3.x and 4.x), Win­dows NT and Cit­rix servers get along with each other and keep­ing Lotus Notes run­ning. We also had sev­eral sorts of Unix boxes around, largely as test beds for devel­op­ment — I was involved with the BSDI machine that acted as our inter­net gate­way more than the others.

More recently, I spent some time as a lead qual­ity ana­lyst on a soft­ware project for major play­ers in the tele­phone indus­try. Our soft­ware ran on HP-​​UX servers with Ora­cle on the back end. We used Segue’s Silk­Test to auto­mate some of our test­ing, but since some­one had bought the NT ver­sion of Silk­Test and most of our test­ing had to be done in Unix, we couldn’t use it to its fullest extent.

In the past I’ve done a lot of internet-​​related sup­port at Mind­Spring and another internet-​​related com­pany, as well as doing soft­ware QA and many other things. When work­ing for start-​​ups, you do what­ever needs to be done no mat­ter what your offi­cial title might be. I enjoyed being a tech­ni­cal writer at Mind­Spring, and would like to return to that kind of work some day.

I got into work­ing with com­put­ers because years ago I was doing admin­is­tra­tive work. I was at var­i­ous times a sec­re­tary, an office man­ager, a book­keeper, and admin­is­tra­tor of a self-​​insured health insur­ance pro­gram for a large for­eign mis­sions board, among other things. I learned about hard­ware and soft­ware out of self-​​defense and frus­tra­tion with deal­ing with MIS peo­ple who were con­de­scend­ing or just too busy to help the admin staff with prob­lems. My cowork­ers started com­ing to me with their ques­tions instead of going to the MIS folks, and I found that I really enjoyed help­ing them get their jobs done. I bought a PC and started telecom­mut­ing while preg­nant with Katie. Friends and neigh­bors started ask­ing me if I’d help them set up home offices or start using com­put­ers in their small busi­nesses, and my con­sult­ing prac­tice was born. Hav­ing come in through the back door, so to speak, I’m able to under­stand what non-​​technical folks need to accom­plish and help them use the tech­nol­ogy as appro­pri­ate to get there. That back­ground also helps me trans­late geek-​​speak into some­thing more acces­si­ble to the rest of the world. I do not have any for­mal tech­ni­cal training.

Our fam­ily has a strong work ethic, so my sib­lings and I were work­ing at home and out­side it at a fairly young age. In addi­tion to doing the stan­dard babysit­ting stuff, I started work­ing in the office of the HVAC com­pany where my dad was a ser­vice man­ager when I was about 12, doing fil­ing and data entry and what­ever else needed to be done. When I got old enough, I (very briefly) did the fast-​​food thing that seems to be a rite of pas­sage for Amer­i­can teenagers, then worked in retail, taught crafts classes, and was a tutor and mother’s helper. While in col­lege I worked part-​​time as a bank teller/​customer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive and worked for another com­pany as an oper­a­tor doing credit card autho­riza­tions and pro­vid­ing long-​​distance oper­a­tor ser­vices for Sprint. I learned dif­fer­ent things at and enjoyed var­i­ous aspects of every­thing I did. The result is hav­ing about 25 years of expe­ri­ence work­ing in widely var­ied fields, and I find that expe­ri­ence very valu­able in every­thing I do now.

Permalink | June 21st, 2012

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