The Midnight Library

I’ve spent thirty years in IT. Not climbing a ladder, more like finding my way through a building where nobody gave me the map. I’m neurodivergent. AUDHD. Took me until my 50s to understand why certain things that came easily to everyone else felt like swimming through concrete, and why the things nobody else could focus on for five minutes could hold me for twelve hours straight. Decades of making it work without knowing how I was making it work. ...

There are two Cisco switches and a router in my garage that have been sitting there for the better part of fifteen years. They were rescues, like nearly everything else in this story. I wanted to learn Cisco networking, so I took them home, racked them up, configured them, got them talking to each other. Spanning tree, VLANs, basic routing. Once they were working and the lab did what I’d built it for, I was done. I didn’t go on to do the CCNA. The kit had served its purpose. It went on a shelf. ...