I got into IT at exactly the right time, right when everyone was curious and nobody knew anything yet.
One of my first tech jobs was at CompUSA in Boca Raton. Weekends only, which was perfect for a college kid. Friday night I’d grab a couple of floppy disks from the training manager, install whatever software was on deck that week, click through it a few times to figure out what it did. Saturday and Sunday afternoons, I’d wheel the computer to the middle of the sales floor and demo the software for customers.
I was twenty-something. I wish I had the sales metrics from those weekends, my management brain screams about that now,but I was twenty-something. You don’t think about metrics at twenty-something.
After a couple months of learning a new piece of software every week, I started hanging around the trainers in the back office. They ran classes all week. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Windows. I asked what it would take to become one of them. Turns out, I just had to ask the training manager.
When I found out they only had one person who could teach CorelDRAW, a program I actually knew,I saw my shot. The training manager told me to come back in a week with a 15-minute demo lesson. I practiced on every friend and classmate who’d sit still for it. Refined it 3 times. Got the job.
Then he asked if I knew Excel.
I said: “You got the training manual? I can teach it.”
What he didn’t know was that I had to go home and ask my stepbrother what Excel even was. His answer: “It’s a spreadsheet program.” My follow-up: “What’s a spreadsheet?”
I believe he invented the facepalm emoji that day.
I went through that training manual 3, maybe 4 times. The following week I’m standing in front of 30 business professionals whose employers paid for them to learn Excel because they were migrating from Lotus 1-2-3. A hand goes up: “Does this work the same way in Lotus 1-2-3?”
I had no idea what Lotus 1-2-3 was. I didn’t know what a spreadsheet was a week ago.
I said, and I remember this word for word,”That’s beyond the scope of this lesson, but catch me in the hallway during the break and I can get that answer for you.”
I was the first one out the door at break. Ran to another instructor. Got the answer. Went back and delivered it like I’d known all along.
There’s a saying: fake it till you make it. But you better make it pretty quick, because you don’t get many chances like that.
What I discovered through all of this was that I genuinely loved teaching people. Watching someone’s eyes light up when they realize they can do something they couldn’t do 5 minutes ago, that never gets old.
Years later, I found the same opportunity on a cruise ship. The line was extending itineraries from 7 days to 12 and 14, and the cruise director needed more activities to fill the schedule. In a hotel director’s meeting, the IT guy raised his hand: “I can teach an Introduction to Computers class.”
His response: “If you can fill an hour, that’s good enough.”
They put me in a small lounge. 50, maybe 60 seats. I asked for a whiteboard and a marker. I stood up and explained what a CPU was, what RAM was, what megahertz meant. I used the analogy that a 386 versus a 486 is like a V6 versus a V8, both will do 55 miles an hour, but one has to work harder, and only one of them will do 120.
The classes kept filling up. Standing room a few times. Within a month, the cruise director moved me to the main show lounge, half the ship’s capacity,and scheduled bingo right after my class. A revenue-producing event, riding the crowd I’d already built.
The IT guy was filling the biggest room on the ship. Teaching people about computers. In the middle of the ocean.
I didn’t plan any of it. I just kept saying yes when someone asked if I could teach something. Thirty years later, I’m still saying yes.