You know what I’d like to do?
I’d like to run a large-ish IT shop with a clear and well-defined budget. I’d like to plan for rolling upgrades so that no one had a workstation or laptop that was older than five years old. If the budget allowed for it, so that no one had equipment that was older than three years old. And, I’d like to take that old, retired equipment and donate it to worth causes, like the Boys and Girls Clubs of America or the Red Cross or Goodwill or something like that. Local charities, too, but all causes that would use that equipment to better someone’s actual life.
I’d like to have servers that were under-utilized for a change, instead of always headed toward being out of resources. Servers with so much room to grow that they still were running smoothly even after a five or six year period, but that were upgraded before they were ten years old anyway, just because that’s the right way to do it.
I’d like to have staff that I could develop and grow and train to be the best IT personnel that techs could imagine being. And, I mean that both through having a training budget to send them out for classes, but also on a personal level. The one thing I really, really miss about being more than a department of one is that chance to teach someone how to do it the right way. (And, yes, there are many ways to get IT stuff done, but, honestly, there are some ways that are more right than others.)
I long for a neat wiring closet again. And an orderly server rack. I miss having a dedicated server room with it’s own A/C and raised floors. Can’t there be a way for even small companies to do that? Shouldn’t we find a way for that to be a thing?
Okay, Universe, there it is. I’ve said it. Now, go make it happen!
