The Modem Programming Tool was finished.
At least as finished as I was willing to let it be.
For months I had continued making improvements.
Fixing little things.
Adding features.
Making it better.
My new boss wanted updates every week.
For a long time I had something to tell him.
Another improvement.
Another optimization.
Another feature.
Then one day I ran out of things to say.
The project was done.
The tool worked.
Business modems that once took time and effort to program could now be configured in seconds.
Every programming event was stored in a database.
Every action was tracked.
Everything worked exactly the way I wanted it to.
That was when my boss asked me a question.
It seemed simple enough.
Did I want to become a programmer?
Or did I want to become one of the field technicians I admired?
To me, those technicians were the elite.
They were the Linux people.
The firewall people.
The business services specialists.
The people who solved problems nobody else could solve.
They lived on the bleeding edge of technology.
Not the cutting edge.
The bleeding edge.
They worked with technologies that were still being figured out.
They went places nobody else went.
They fixed things nobody else could fix.
I admired them.
I wanted to be one of them.
Looking back, the answer should have been obvious.
I had wanted to be a programmer for most of my life.
I learned BASIC as a kid.
I wrote scripts.
I automated anything I could get my hands on.
I had just spent months building the largest software project of my career.
Everything I had done pointed in one direction.
But when he asked the question, I gave a different answer.
Without hesitation.
I told him I wanted to be one of the field technicians.
One of the elite.
The people I had admired for years.
My boss nodded.
The conversation ended.
At the time it felt like an easy decision.
The programmers sat behind desks.
The field technicians lived on the bleeding edge.
That was where I wanted to be.
For years I became exactly what I wanted.
I worked alongside the people I admired.
I learned more than I ever thought possible.
I saw technologies most people never knew existed.
At the time, it felt like the right answer.
Years later, I wasn't so sure.