• Mood: uplifted
• Music: Cypress Hill - Rock Superstar

holy shit... I do matter

In the course of getting variously scoffed at, called a liar and a shill, interrogated and otherwise treated rather rudely on a rather large tech forum that's got a heavy and prevalent Microsoft bias (complete with a few MS-employed astroturfers) I wound up explaining my business model as a consultant and my volume of business to a guy who works on the enterprise side of things and isn't at all familiar with the small biz sector (an awful lot of the IT industry isn't). Honestly, I normally kind of feel a little... well, like I'm less than I should be, or could be, in terms of my business success. Like I'm maybe a little too lazy. I'm just not that aggressive or ambitious about growing my business; as long as I'm making good money I'm generally happy and prefer to let whatever growth may be, be, and the hell with the rest.

But in actually quantifying what I do in terms of customers and machines in order to explain to a third party who I didn't know and who didn't know me, I realized that I'm single-handedly responsible for administering over 60 different servers, not including my own personal or even my own business's servers - and that's only among my most frequent "core" customers. A couple of those customers are (internet hosting) service providers themselves, with a few hundred businesses apiece relying on them. And I also handle an average of probably ten desktop machines per server. And all the networking equipment required to keep all that stuff talking to each other. And a tremendous chunk of the general end-user support needed at the sites in question.

A tremendous chunk of the downtown areas of my city has been getting heavily torn down and reconstructed for a few years now. Several of those same customers of mine have been directly responsible for the planning, engineering, and architecture of a lot of that work. Which makes me feel like an important part of that.

Shit. I'm not saying my city would stop functioning if I tripped in front of a bus, but I'm more important than I realized I was. Go me.

(In unrelated but also gratifying news, I got carded buying an "M" rated video game tonight. It's been a kinda gratifying day.)