My first entry. What's it about?

Wow. My first words in a public weblog. What should i write. Who want's to know what i have to say? What could i say? What should i say? All these kinds of questions rushed through my thoughts. Don't get me wrong, i am not new to online information and weblogs. But writing stuff that potentially everyone can read? This sure makes me shiver some times. What's that called? Stagefright? Funny actually, me being not so tactical in expressing my opinion. I sometimes get accused of being too blunt-manored. So why do i get nervous when writing these lines? It probable needs some getting used to. So what should my first entry be about? Let's not get too technical on my first post. Let's try to find out if more off you in the IT industry experience the same things when talking to non-IT people. A real-life example here; You and your wife/husband/friend/girlfiend, or whoever, go to a party of someone you know. Let's make it a birthdayparty. You see people you know, but also meet people you have never seen. The seem nice, and there are free seats near them. So you go and sit next to them. You get into some conversations about various things. During the conversation you already found out he or she knows very little to nothing about IT. They think they know all about their desktop computer at home and they even got wireless networking going. So they consider themselves experts. Suddenly they seam interested and ask you what kind of work you do. AAARGGHHHH. How on earth am i going to explain them what kind of work i do? You try to be nice and start telling them that you're a storage administrator for your company. Ah, in a warehouse they reply? Hmmm no, you sigh. I take care of the various disk and tape subsystems in order to provide centralized storage of electronic information to different kinds of hosts. You are also responsible for the fibrechannel infrastructure that connects the servers to the storage, through switches and directors. You can tell by the looks on their face that you've already lost them half way through the sentence. What do you do? Try to explain them what fibrechannel does? Well, fibrechannel is actually a long SCSI cable. Nothing more if you like to put it in their perspective. There, you've said it. SCSI? What's SCSI they reply. You then decide it's best not to mention all the various platforms you can work on, like AIX, HP-UX, Linux and the variety of Windows flavours and the "mainframes" you've come across. Better not start on the way backups work in large environments. You quickly try to change the subject...... My point is, that in my experience it is almost impossible to talk about your work to non-IT related people, when you are in a specialized field like Storage and Storage networking. It seems like they are interested and really like to know, but they just can't grasp what you will tell them. Due to this, i harldy talk about work when i am "off-duty". Resulting in nobody in my personal live really knows what i do for a living. I hope this blog and the RM.com forum gives me a chance to get into some nice discussions on the storage subject. Nice meeting you.