I’ll be the first to admit that jumping from IT operations manager to freelance writer seems, well, a bit far-fetched. When you look at some episodes from my working life, however, it will start to make more sense. I hope.

I always did great in English class. My college papers consistently received high marks and praise from my professors and peer reviewers (BA in Anthropology, I know, from that to IT is itself quite a leap).

Then I hit the working world and got a bit…sidetracked.

I was never that IT guy. You know the one. He goes home after work and builds gaming PCs in his basement man cave. First off, never had a man cave. Second off, I’ve always preferred to spend my free time outside.

The story of how I ended up with my first real-world job as tech support for a real estate company is one for another time. What matters today is that I was supporting an in-house productivity suite and property search tool used by realtors and office staff.

My days were spent fielding calls that started something like this: “Hi, I can’t do the thing.”

And my job was to ask enough of the right questions to figure out what the thing they were trying to do was, what was happening instead, and then either walk them through the right way to do the thing or take the issue to the developers. This entailed translating from realtor-speak to dev-speak as I walked to the back of the office. Then once they fixed the thing, translating what they did back to realtor-speak on my way back to my desk.

So, I got real good at a couple of things, real fast:

  1. tech-to-English translation
  2. listening through the frustration to understand what someone meant, rather than stopping at what they said

With that much of an intro out of the way, let’s dive a little deeper into my reasons for leaving the IT world behind (well, sort of, I still do a lot of writing about tech) and jumping into writing as a career. Stay with me through the sidetracks and seemingly random ramblings, I almost always bring it back around.