Black Box, an infrastructure, network, and technology provider, has revaeled the winner of its “You know you’re in IT if...” contest. The contest received more than 1000 entries.
After some painstaking evaluation, the entries were reduced down to a pool of 40. Voting was held over a two-week period on blackbox.com and on Spiceworks, and the contest was promoted on numerous IT and technology sites, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and on the engineer community forum Element 14.
Brian Kutchma, vice president of sales and marketing at Black Box, says that, because of the overwhelming response to this contest, the company plans on holding more in the future.
Entries ranged from the humorous to the esoteric. The grand prize winner, Richard Warfield of Gaithersburg, Maryland, won an Apple iPad with his answer: "You know you’re in IT if your pets are named CAT5 and CAT6."
Richard got started in cabling in the mid 80s and founded his own cabling business in 1999. He says, “My answer to the contest just came to me one day while I was taking a break on a job and catching up on e-mails. My family has a dog and six cats so I am sure there was some hidden inspiration in there somewhere.”
Here are the rest of the top ten endings to the sentence, “You know you’re in IT if…”
...you paid $6000 for your computer and $500 for your car.
...when you get that 3 a.m. phone call, your first thought isn’t “Hope the kids are OK,” but instead “What’s wrong at work NOW?!”.
...you accidentally tell your wife to submit a ticket when she asks you what you want for dinner.
...you’ve racked up ten weeks of vacation and still don’t have time to take any.
...you know your IP address better than your phone number.
...your doctor asks if you have enough fiber in your diet and you ask “single or multimode?”
...you go into sleep mode when left idle.
...you carry a USB drive in your pocket everywhere you go.
A lot of the other entries fit into one of several categories, including pets, cars, fashion, food, and sleep.
Pets:
...your dog's name is Steve.
Cars:
… you know 400 usernames and passwords and phone extensions, but you forget where your car keys are.
Fashion:
…all your t-shirts are freebies from IT vendors.
…you have more e-mail addresses than you do pairs of shoes.
Food:
…there are crumbs of food wedged in all your electronic peripherals.
…your office wall is stacked with empty caffeinated soda cans.
Sleep:
…you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about network optimization.
…you count 1's and 0's on restless nights.
