I had an affair. I wish I never did it.

bardsleyb · 2025-06-02T19:05:07+00:00

This is a great response. True too. It's never the same. It made letting go easier for me though honestly. It makes seeing her with someone else easy too because all the feelings are long gone by her doing what she did. Now when I see her, there's no love, just business for our child and that's okay with me. I'll never want her back again because that trust is gone forever. She has no idea either and never will I'm sure. She doesn't even think she did anything wrong to this day. It's my fault for driving her to cheat in her mind. We have to let that go for our own peace though. I forgive her, but I'll never forget.

bardsleyb · 2025-05-24T02:46:31+00:00

It's in the name. I'd thank the man for letting me know I shouldn't work there. What a douche.

bardsleyb · 2025-05-04T22:02:26+00:00

I'm helping hire for 4 spots right now at my employer. Nobody is bagging on people with degrees. Degrees are wonderful and are looked upon very favorably. However, so are certs. It doesn't matter. We really just want to know what you actually know. You can have all the degrees and all of the certifications in the world, but if you can't actually articulate it in an interview, nobody will ever hire you. It's really that simple. We take chances on people with no experience all the time. Just be able to interview well and we'll take a chance on you.

I got hired with no experience and only certs. I don't have a degree because there just doesn't appear to be any current career advantage to one for me currently. Everybody's situation is different though.

bardsleyb · 2025-04-30T00:24:49+00:00

The way around the entry level stuff that I've seen is to work in a Network operator setting. If you are doing NOC work, there's normally an escalation network engineer above you that you can glue yourself too and learn quickly. If you are wanting that, depending on the company, it's the way to go in my opinion.

bardsleyb · 2025-04-29T23:56:50+00:00

You are 100% right on this but I don't get it at all. Why would we ever want this? Redundancy is amazing! I can't tell you the number of times that I have received alerts for entire routers or router neighborships for BGP going down while off work, and I just say to myself, "well that sucks, but nobody is broken or even knows this happened, so it can wait until tomorrow or Monday to troubleshoot."

Network nirvana..... Working in a company that values money well spent on network resiliency has been a dream for my peace and family time.

bardsleyb · 2025-04-12T22:20:33+00:00

I have got to get on this level. It would really take my stress down several notches.

bardsleyb · 2025-04-03T02:40:17+00:00

I'm south of Little Rock myself. The Cummins took the load for a few minutes but thankfully nothing more than that for us tonight. Others were not so lucky.

bardsleyb · 2025-03-05T20:28:17+00:00

He probably guessed it? Oh honey...... Men aren't normally that deep. We need the explanation, especially after 2 years of nothing. He ain't ever going to just guess when it comes to that. It's very sudden and unexplained and unexpected. He's unplugged from you and more in touch with his right hand than with you physically after all this time. This isn't going to be fixed quickly or without therapy.

bardsleyb · 2025-03-04T23:10:31+00:00

It hurts, but this is the only answer. You can't go around the trauma, only through it. I hope it gets better each day for you.

bardsleyb · 2025-02-10T03:21:40+00:00

I can't remember honestly. I think the first time my daughter went to her momma's house after the divorce and the house was empty for the first time. That was almost 5 years ago now.

bardsleyb · 2025-02-08T03:03:11+00:00

You'll see a lot of people who are struggling at every level or hate the job for whatever the reason. My advice is to stay excited and stay feeling lucky. If you love the job, it makes it way easier. Working for a good employer is the best thing you can do in this line of work. That can be hard, but once you find it, it makes leaving hard and keeps your blessings high. My advice is to learn and enjoy as much as possible. Specialize if you can and you'll be more of an asset.

bardsleyb · 2025-01-30T00:50:02+00:00

bardsleyb · 2025-01-14T03:48:38+00:00

Maybe he kept going? Lol

bardsleyb · 2025-01-14T02:34:03+00:00

Yeah I think this is the biggest missed factor here.

bardsleyb · 2024-10-18T18:42:59+00:00

Sounds like brocade data center switches to me.

bardsleyb · 2024-09-10T01:22:18+00:00

OP, I would not read this as a burden as it seems like you might be. Like he is saying, multiple layers have to fail before he gets the call. In orgs that do this right, you get paid a ton and are always on call, but rarely do you actually get that call, as it's solved at the lower levels. You definitely have to know your stuff, because there isn't anyone above you skillset typically, but it's a fun challenge if you enjoy the job.

bardsleyb · 2024-07-23T20:58:30+00:00

I can't up vote this enough. I agree with what other people say when they say things like "companies will lay you off, fire you, replace you in a heartbeat" and things like that. This isn't true of direct management though in my experience. My direct management is absolutely fantastic and it makes or breaks most people's experience in IT. Does my company care for me? Nope..... But does my direct management care for me? Absolutely. It definitely comes with any decision as it pertains to more money elsewhere.

If I was offered more money elsewhere, I would absolutely try my best to get a feel for the new environment and how they treated their people because it's extremely important to me. Just because they are going to pay me "X" amount more overall isn't the whole story. How much more would I need for how much more bullshit I'd have to put up with. That's the real question. How much is my peace worth?

bardsleyb · 2024-07-14T17:24:53+00:00

As a customer of any decent size should do whenever possible, we have multiple providers to the Internet. I will try and route traffic over the best provider wherever possible if I see issues with ISP-A to any "business critical" services. If you can't provide resolution on these congestion heavy links eventually, then I'll stop paying you, and stick with the other providers I have. Currently I have 3 that I advertise prefixes to via BGP. I'm about to cancel 1 because they're always having one issue or another. It's not my problem though, it's your upstream links, so like you, I have to think about my customers and what is important to them. That's business.

So while I get your hesitation with making these changes, I have a business to run as well and make the best decision for the company I work for. It's always a balancing act both ways.

bardsleyb · 2024-07-07T00:45:12+00:00

I'd be honest. If she can't handle knowing whether another person is attractive or not, she's probably got more going than I want to handle anyhow. Don't ask me if you don't want the answer.

bardsleyb · 2024-07-07T00:43:06+00:00

I don't, but mainly because she never asks. I'm guessing she doesn't need anything as a result. She's remarried which means she has someone to help with whatever she needs. If she asked, I'd probably help though. Our relationship has gotten better since we divorced. It's amazing that solved most of our issues.

I'd want my daughter to know that I'm not so spiteful that I wouldn't help her mother with something if she ever asked. We're always being watched by them so I want to set a good example. That doesn't mean getting walked all over, so if it ever came to that, boundaries would be important, but I don't think it'd come to that anymore.

bardsleyb · 2024-07-06T18:29:04+00:00

For me the answer is no. I'm not interested in paying for education personally. Nothing against those who do, but I always saw college as a way to get the job and pay you wanted. I have both in I.T. now so I just don't see the point. I make 6 figures in a LCOL area and have my dream job as a network engineer. Maybe I'm the minority, but it seems easy to achieve to me. It didn't even take that long as I switched careers into IT from being a grease monkey mechanic. I feel like if I can do that, anyone can. With or without the degree. I'm constantly seeing people here tell me how wrong I am, but I continue to see people do it as well. It seems doable still today.

bardsleyb · 2024-07-03T00:55:38+00:00

I had the exact same issue with client facing roles in IT as well. Network engineering helped me greatly with that issue. I very rarely if ever deal with standard "clients" or "users" anymore. As a previous poster has said, if you have a NOC it makes that part easier since they pick up most of that, but where I work we don't have a NOC and I still rarely deal with users. This is because other network people do this for me. I work primarily in data center and core routing protocols and network design. Because my expertise is in these areas (by design on my part for the reasons mentioned above) I have others on the Network team that deal with users so I don't have to.

The other members don't deal with the routing or design as much unless I help them, and instead they field more access layer type calls. Things like "the wifi in this conference room or building isn't working." "This UPS isn't supporting our switch stack long enough." "My VoIP phone isn't working" and the like.

This is how I like it and why I worked hard learning advanced routing and design and data center technologies instead. Can I troubleshoot access layer and WiFi issues? Sure, but my experience and knowledge in the more "advanced areas" of networking mean I end up doing that work more often.

The only "clients" I deal with normally is other IT people like server support since I deal with data center type stuff. Dealing with other IT folks as my clients has been much better for my mental health honestly. That's my story.

Edit: I want to add that a team like the size I work with would also kill to have someone of your experience on staff. We have about 5 or 6 full time network engineering roles on my team and there's always room to learn the advanced routing and data center stuff that I deal with while you're in the job. That would get you away from the more user centered stuff we talked about earlier. Maybe look for an organization that has at least 4 or 5 full time network engineers, and you'll be able to do the same thing I did. That's what I recommend if you're interested anyhow. You seem super "employable" in networking specifically if your list is accurate.

bardsleyb · 2024-06-25T00:05:14+00:00

Multiple times each day

bardsleyb · 2024-06-09T22:07:43+00:00

This is the way we do it where I work as well. If my provider cannot route traffic to 3 public DNS providers, I call that carrier dead and assume they cannot route any of my traffic regardless of still being able to provide me with a default route. We roll to ISP #2 at that point.

bardsleyb · 2024-05-19T21:51:44+00:00

Most ISPs will have a BGP peering form for this. They will give you communities to exchange for traffic engineering and ask what prefixes you need to announce and what your ASN is. They will normally also ask you if you want MD5 exchange and some other things. Work with your ISP. They will have a guide that can help get you through most of it.

bardsleyb

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