Well, this is a slightly strange story, but I’ll tell it to you anyway.
Sometime last year, I took an online training course for IT stuff. It was largely just a digital version of a well-known book, formatted in a way to give access to interactive quizzes and lab computers between each chapter. This is a fairly common practice, and I imagine it’s a bit of a coordinated effort between the author and the learning platform. The author, of course, writes the training course or book. The learning platform sets up the quizzes and hosts remotely accessible, virtual computers… and then formats it all as a big classroom you can access from home.
But there was something different about this one. In the middle of chapters, there were these lecture videos from a woman who never said her name. At first, I thought she was the book’s author… but no, that was not the case. All I ever saw of her was a tiny bubble with her face in the corner of some PowerPoint slides, but she explained technical concepts better than anyone I had ever encountered.
She had glasses and medium-length grey hair. She often spoke of her kids—and perhaps grandkids. With no other name to attribute to her, I affectionately began using the title “Networking Grandma,” both for the reasons I assumed she was a grandmother and the topic at hand was computer networking.
Networking Grandma was the best teacher I never really had.
Her tone of voice was always so practical, never dull, like she was just casually sitting in my living room and I was learning technical concepts by association. And she used personal stories to back up the concepts she was teaching.
“Why do we do it that way? Let me tell you. Back in the 90s I was leading a team in Africa…”
She had been around for a while. All over the world, too. She had a lifetime of experience that few possess. There are folks that can teach it… and other folks who have done it… but rarely do you find those two in the same person.
Occasionally, she’d go off on technical tangent, then stop herself, saying “well, that’s a bit too in-depth for this course, but if you want to learn more, I have a class on it.”
Oh my gods, I was so ready to find all of her other classes and take them.
I scoured the course for her name. Surely, her name would be mentioned somewhere in the text? In the description? On a reference list? As a footnote, at least?
No. No. No, and… no.
Well, the learning platform should know who was in their videos, right?
I spent a month emailing their customer support. “Hi, I’d like to purchase more of your courses,” I said. “Could you please give me a list of what this woman teaches?”
“Sorry,” they said. “We can’t identify who that is.”
Maybe the internet would know. I tried reverse image searches. I tried posting on reddit. I even tried an AI search based on what she looked like and the projects she had mentioned being a part of around the world.
Zilch. Nada. Nil.
Nobody knew.
Perhaps she will always remain a mystery.
(Side note: If you happen to know a grey-haired woman with glasses who has kids, who once helped install network cabling in a hospital in Africa, and who currently makes online training videos about Cisco routing and networking, please tell me her name)
Good morning and happy Monday, friends!
I am now officially a ServiceNow Certified System Administrator (CSA).
Yeah, I know. Unless you’ve been in the tech industry, you’ve probably never heard of that company. Hell, I had never heard of them… and as for what they do, well… it’s really not that interesting.
So why did I take this test? Okay, let me rewind a bit.
Over the summer, and through my school, I was invited to participate in an “externship learning experience,” which turned out to just be a fancy term for Zoom classes. I had never heard of ServiceNow, but they were promising free training and they’d cover the exam cost if you successfully finished the material.
Look, technical certification tests are not cheap. On average, it’s $200-500 just to take a test, although there are others that cost well over $1000 (OffSec Certified Professional, or OSCP+, for example, is about $1,600 last time I checked). If you fail, you just wasted the money, so people will spend thousands more on training classes.
Getting all that for free is awesome. Plus, Certified System Administrator sounds pretty cool. I figured I’d give it a go. What’s the harm?
If you Google ServiceNow, you’ll find out that they are “a cloud-based enterprise platform that automates, streamlines, and manages digital workflows across an entire organization.” They’re pretty big and on the Fortune 500 list.
But that doesn’t really tell you what they actually do—and at that point, I still didn’t know. So I was very interested in the first Zoom meeting, as one of the stated agenda items was high-level company execs explaining exactly what their company does.
Instead of explaining that, however, they mainly just talked about other big companies that they partnered with. Oh well, I’ll learn through the training.
And I did. It didn’t take my long to figure out that it’s basically database management. After a short while, I realized something important…
I hate database management.
Still, maybe it’ll be useful one day. I stuck with it. I finished the training, probably investing about 100 hours of my time over the summer. It might not have been fun, but it was all relatively straightforward.
And then I took an actual practice test for the real exam, discovering that the free training provided to me only took baby steps into the truly technical material. In short, I’d have to study. And I’d study when there was time.
But my free exam voucher had an expiration date of October 8. Naturally, I scheduled my test at an appropriate testing center for this last possible date, figuring I’d find some time in between then and now to study comfortably.
Of course, I didn’t ever find that time. So that’s what I did this past week. I crammed. I thought about skipping it entirely… after all, I don’t even like databases… but I had conveniently worked my way into a sunk cost fallacy. Luckily, since I passed, I don’t have to worry about that anymore.
The testing center was really nice. They even gave me a stress ball to combat my anxiety.
I know, that was a lot of talk about something dull, but that was pretty much the majority of all my waking hours.
Coven night happened on Friday. We made talismans out of Sculpey, which is always fun.
On Sunday, we went to the farmers market and picked up some spice mixes and fresh produce.
Also, Selene made some apple pastry things that were delicious.
This week, I might actually have time to make progress on a new M3 episode.
That’s all for now, friends! Stay tuned for more soon!
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