The IT Guy

Published: 7 October 2026     Last Updated: 7 October 2026     Categories: Personal

Between 2007 – 2018 I had a career as an IT / ICT Technician (The difference is still lost to me). The first question you might have is, “Is turning it off and on again really an answer you give a lot?” YES because it WORKS.

“What do?”

Growing up, I was very much on cruise control and not really asking a lot of obvious questions such as “What happens after year 6 in primary school?” I genuinely didn’t know high school was a thing until I was in Year 6, when I started getting asked which school I was going to 😅. I remember during a school assembly (I was around 6 years old), the headteacher Mr Thomas asked everyone to raise their hand and tell him what they were going to do when they were older.

Lots of hands shot up.

“Fireman!”

“Policeman!”

“Astronaut!”

“Window cleaner… 😶‍🌫️”

Yep, that last one was me. It got a lot of laughs which I didn’t understand at the time because I was dead serious. I always thought it looked like a fun job but I quickly realised that in the eyes of everyone else, I wasn’t exactly aiming high 🪜.

In high school, I didn’t really think ahead much either but thankfully my Mum did. She encouraged me to take all the opportunities I could, including “teaching” at our school’s “City Learning Centre” (CLC). The CLC was a glorified building filled with computers that offered adult courses to the community, and it was my responsibility to help the teachers as an assistant, showing the adults how to use a computer and its software. I enjoyed this a lot, it was scary, but I really loved it. I think I did it for a few months in total before the programme ended.

As I went on in high school, it began to dawn on me that I had no idea what I was going to do after leaving. I knew I liked computers and could easily learn anything thrown at me, but is that what I really wanted? A few years prior to this, my Dad left a high intense manual labour job to go into IT, in schools specifically and he excelled at it. This piqued my interest.

Getting into IT

Before leaving school, I was given the opportunity to shadow my school’s IT team (Identical to what my Dad was doing in another school), they needed help over the summer. It was incredibly invaluable, and really gave me a crash course on what it was like to work with a bunch of guys. They’d scratch their asses, complain about all of my teachers, fart, burp, drink coffee and blast Foo Fighters (Who I had never heard before until this point, I remember loving it so much I stole the disc, burned it to a blank disc and took it home to listen to. Cheeky.).

Overall, it was a crash course in what the world of working was actually like. They were really great, and absolutely did not give a shit at all. They even gave me the admin password to the school’s administrator account which had full access to everything… which was very dangerous especially as I had another year of school left.

It wasn’t all just messing around, it was actually really hard work. I’d be unpacking and moving heavy computers + CRT monitors, moving them all around the school. I set up hundreds of desktop PCs and “building” laptops (Building = Installing the OS + school’s layer of management software AKA RM Community Connect 3) heck I even built tables at one point. I’d wake up the next morning absolutely aching all over. I really enjoyed the challenge.

I then did two years of sixth form which honestly were uneventful, it’s not really worth mentioning from a career standpoint. After that ended, I did my A-Levels, did terribly of course, and it was now finally time to be let loose into the “real world” which felt very different and unforgiving suddenly. I still had no real idea what I wanted to do next, I always felt like I was going at someone else’s pace rather than my own. There were only two paths in front of me…

⬅️ University                        Start a Career ➡️

Both were equally scary, but I felt like University was a completely pointless option, I still do, especially in today’s rapidly changing IT world. I felt like by the time I had mastered everything in the curriculum, the tech around me would’ve changed. And it has a dozen or so times.

So I made the decision, IT it was, but getting “into” IT is extremely difficult, near impossible I’d say, unless you had someone already in that world who would give you that experience. Luckily I had that person, my Dad. By this point he had been in IT for 5ish years I believe, and was already a Network Manager, which is a posh way to say “The boss of the school’s IT”. It wasn’t as easy as “My son is going to shadow me”, he had to convince the business manager of the school to make a placement for me as it would be paid work. Thankfully my help in my high school went a long way to convince them, and they offered me a temporary contract doing their websites with the possibility of doing IT tasks down the road.

Eating pizza and chips in my Dad’s office, nicknamed “Middle Earth” by the teachers. School pizza was god-tier. I have no explanation why, it just was.

I think I built a few websites:

• A higher education website
• A gaming club website
• I began working on the school’s actual website

Which really helped me with my Photoshop skills (Yes you can build fully functioning websites in Photoshop).

The gaming club website I made in 2007ish.

This was an all boys school, and I remember my first day someone got a brick thrown at their head and was bleeding heavily. It was rough, and it wouldn’t be the first time my first day at a new school would be eventful.

After my 6 month contract was over, I “signed on” for the first time and began receiving state benefits. Every time I think of this, I get the awful smell of Subway assault my nostrils somehow. It was right next door and it absolutely honked. Signing on was so depressing, it felt like they couldn’t have cared less and it was so easy to cheat the system and say “Yeah I’m looking for work” and make any shit up. I actually tried my hardest to secure ANY job, everyone turned me down. I was that way for around a year before my Dad secured me an ICT Technician job at his school, it was exactly what I needed. I think it was a rolling contract that they’d end at any point, and it lasted around 10 months.

My first job, in the cheapest suit imaginable with what can only be described as a £1 haircut.

Those 10 months were invaluable. My Dad taught me so much, but we butted heads just as much, to the point where we wouldn’t talk to each other at all on the way home. It was pretty awful and it was all because I was a “know it all teenager”, the absolute worst. This was super rare for us as well, we never argued and it was clear we couldn’t really work together long term. While things were pretty bad, the job also gave me a MASSIVE confidence boost. I’d sometimes walk into a class with other boys not much different in age than me and literally stand on a ladder (I was afraid of heights) and nervously change a bulb in a projector as everyone watched me in silence. I was bright red, pouring with sweat and couldn’t focus, but I got it done and it would be the first of many, each time getting easier.

I’m not going to go over my whole career, so I’ll just summarise it from here onward: I spent around 10 years as a Technician and towards the end of my time in IT I finally hit the pinnacle of my career options: Network Manager, which was the thing I was chasing for years. Those early placements really got me in the door and allowed me to stand on my own.

In total I worked in 4 schools:

• An all boys high school
• A SEN (Special Educational Needs) school
• Your average high school
• An Academy

I’m going to focus more on the “interesting facts” aspect of working in a school and some funny/interesting stories. So, let’s get started.

What was it actually like being an IT Technician?

The Job

A lot of the job was rebuilding PCs, although not physically. That did happen every so often, and sometimes we’d have endless benches of PCs and laptops. This meant reinstalling the OS and RM CC3/CC4, which could take anywhere from 2 to 5 hours depending on the specs of the PC and the junk we would put on it. From there, we’d have to deploy software, which was always so, so clunky, especially packaging software for the first time to deploy. Luckily, we rarely touched Active Directory because RM CC4 laid on top of it and did most of the work. I later used AD without RM, which was actually a blast. Group Policy was much the same, we rarely touched it, but later on I heavily used it. It’s very clunky, and would require multiple restarts to apply a change normally.

Rebuilding a bunch of laptops.

Of course, the bulk of our day was user management and password resets for students and teachers. Network troubleshooting, even though it was at the heart of our job, was actually rare, but when something broke, you heard about it straight away because it would always have a ripple effect through the school. I loved the networking side a lot, especially the cabling aspect, whether it was crimping my own cables or using existing ones, it was an absolute blast. It’s kind of cool knowing cables I’ve made are probably still in use today. Going up those high ladders though was not fun.

Server maintenance was another thing that always made us cringe, because there were big risks with patching “The Server”, including downing the entire network for all staff and students. Thankfully these events were rare, but they did happen. Backups were daily, weekly and monthly. We had endless tapes and it was a bloody nightmare keeping up with it sometimes. The backup software was always the worst part, and it took forever to restore anything.

Antivirus thankfully really ran itself, although the days when a virus was in the news were the worst as we’d have to rush to patch all our machines. Beyond keeping things running, there was also a surprising amount of procurement involved. I LOVED dealing with suppliers, finding the best deals and being a bit cheeky with them to get a little extra. So much fun. I’d often be seen in the office printing purchase orders and handing them to finance.

A lot of the bigger jobs were saved for the holidays. Classroom setups would usually involve days of work getting everything set up, while network upgrades were always dreaded because they’d always break something new.

As time went on, data protection and CCTV also became more prevalent, and we’d have all sorts of events daily including assaults which were so serious they’d have police involvement and even court hearings.

There were many other odd jobs that I couldn’t even begin to start listing, but that was the bulk of it.

The Technology

If you want to understand what school IT was like back then, you have to start with just how old some of the technology was. Floppy disks were everywhere even years after everyone stopped using them. One of my first jobs was to install Windows 98 (or ME?) on a really, really old computer using what felt like 50 floppys. I just checked, yep, it was 39. Even in the mid 2000s I have no idea why I was installing such an old OS, but knowing a thing or two about school budgets, it was likely to ensure a very old piece of software could still run. When floppys suddenly stopped being a thing, there were suddenly thousands of CDs littering my office, all written in permanent marker with a vague idea of what was on it.

This was taken in 2016, seriously.

During most of my run as an IT Technician, Windows XP was the gold standard, even long after Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 came out. It took schools YEARS to catch up, mostly because the software we had just wasn’t compatible. In fact, most of the issues were with incompatible drivers. It didn’t help that RM Community Connect 3 (or 4) felt like it was years behind, which is what most schools in the UK relied heavily on. There did finally come the day though that Microsoft told the world that XP wouldn’t be supported, which finally kicked everyone’s ass into upgrading the machines to 10. It was painful, mostly because the machines weren’t up to it, and it cost schools an absolute fortune to replace all of those computers.

A standard IT room (Building has long been demolished).

The hardware wasn’t exactly anything to write home about either. I think it’s fair to say schools always had the absolute worst monitors in any building in the UK. If it wasn’t the most jankiest CRT, it was the absolute cheapest TFT that would break if someone breathed on it. Laptops in general were so, so slow back then, and they’d have endless battery issues because teachers left them plugged in for weeks at a time. There was also the unfortunate case of “laptop trolleys”, which began becoming popular in the late 2000s/early 2010s. To say these things were abused and a mess would be an understatement. In theory they were actually really useful, you’d put your laptops into the trays and remember to plug them in for the next class. These basic things were always forgotten and we’d have to provide “spare laptops” frequently.

The underlying technology was just as interesting. Most schools, including ours, used TAPES, actual tapes to store backups. These would often fail, and were very fragile. There were many times that we were asked to restore files, and it would be such a pain. It would take hours to restore a single file… it was so, so slow. Wireless was also a luxury that most schools got later than most businesses. It was a very big deal for a school to have full Wi-Fi, and even then it would be incredibly weak due to the budget constraints. Some of those old wireless access points looked like they’d give you more radiation than Bruce Banner got.

Then there were network drives. Teachers and network drives. You’d never in a million years see something as chaotic as a network drive without restrictions. These places became an absolute cesspit, a complete dumping ground for teachers. If something needed sharing, they’d put it on a network drive, then forget about it after it was shared. Our servers were constantly being filled with the most useless files imaginable including random personal files like holiday photos (!?). The thing is, if you moved one file, even something they hadn’t touched in 5 years, you’d get a knock asking you to restore it within an hour. I don’t know how they knew, but they always did. Students, in comparison, weren’t too bad with their home directories. Sure you’d get some that put in 1 or 2 or 30 flash games on their drive, but compared to teachers they were saints.

And then there were printers. FUCKING PRINTERS. Printers are notoriously annoying, but school printers were on another level. Setting them up wasn’t too bad to be honest, but maintaining them was the absolute worst. I think I’d spend a large percentage of my day fixing a printer in some random office in the depths of Middle Earth. They got a little, tiny, tiiiny bit better when we replaced inkjets with lasers, but they were still a massive pain in the ass. Common issues included the drum dying, the fuser dying, paper jamming, toner replacement, toner leaking (I once leaked toner all down a corridor before noticing right at the end lol), paper trays being broken or misaligned, someone printing out 500000000 files, teachers leaving endless pieces of paper on the top and not collecting them, being overloaded with paper, the wrong type of paper, and something else you’d never figure out. It was endless. We had anywhere between 70-100 printers around the schools I worked in until we began centralising printing (Thank god).

Me looking satisfied with my printing solutions for an advertisement for one of our suppliers. Smiling to myself at the end because I’m thinking “What a bunch of bullshit.”

Classrooms had their own collection of technology problems. Whiteboards weren’t anything special until interactive boards came along, which in my experience were an absolute waste of money. In the end, teachers began asking for non-interactive whiteboards besides their interactive ones because they missed writing on them. There were many times teachers would write on interactive whiteboards with actual pens, and they’d be stained forever no matter what you did 😂. The “pen” tools on interactive whiteboards were rarely used, they were clunky, inaccurate and worst of all so slow and laggy.

Some of the mad shit you’d find printed off and laminated.

Projectors were probably the least of my issues when working as an IT tech, but when they died it was an absolute pain. Due to an increase in thefts, they were often secured with locks which would require a key, which often went walkies for some reason. Much like the rest of the school’s equipment, everything was a random mixture of different devices, and projectors and their expensive “hard to find” bulbs were no exception, so you’d spend a good hour trying to find and buy something.

Then, as technology moved on, Macs and iPads started becoming a bigger part of the job. The Macs were always exclusive to art departments because despite there being totally acceptable solutions on Windows, the art staff always refused to use them. They were extremely expensive (Shock), completely disconnected from the wider network and frequently required software maintenance/upgrades. They took up a lot of our time at one point.

iPads also became very popular later into my career but were heavily vandalised. Because the school didn’t have much funding, it was on us to try to fix them. If you’ve tried to fix an iPad/iPod/iPhone before you’ll know it’s like breaking into a vault covered in sugar glass. I can’t count the amount of times I made myself bleed everywhere because of the glass shattering suddenly, or when I was replacing a screen. I’d come home with cuts all over my hands despite trying my best to be careful.

The People

Thinking back, I don’t think I worked with a single asshole among the IT Techs. It was just a blast from day one to the very end, across 4 different schools. I remember we’d sometimes make up stupid games like “The Office Olympics” or draw goofy stuff on the whiteboards. We were there to do a job, but we also had a lot of fun doing it.

LOL, my old boss used to HATE the Macs. He’d make us do all of that work. One day we surprised him by replacing his PC with the oldest mac, keyboard and mouse we could find 😂 he was not thrilled.

Teachers were a different story. Most teachers were nice to work with… why am I hesitating writing that… I’d say it was 60/40. Some of the nastiest people I’ve ever met were teachers unfortunately. You could tell quite a few of them got a massive ego boost out of shouting at kids. There have been many times a teacher has come to me and said “Can you fix my laptop?”, and I’ve opened the lid only to be greeted with 4,000 colonies of bacteria never discovered before, if Attenborough saw what I saw, he’d have gone apeshit. I’ve also told those people to go away and clean their device before I’d go anywhere near it. I mean come on… do you have any respect? It was so disgusting. That 40% I mentioned would always call us 5 minutes before a lesson was due to start and ask for something urgently. It was a massive pain and it was clear they thought the world revolved around them and we were basically lesser than them. Those other 60% though were genuinely amazing people. As I said, teachers were some of the nastiest people I’ve met, but there have been many that are some of the nicest and genuinely want to see their students succeed.

Office staff were generally some of the most down to earth, lovely people you could meet. I’d spend a lot of time talking with office staff, sharing life stories on my breaks and just enjoying time away from the hustle and bustle of school life. Everyone apart from the finance teams and the odd receptionist, anyway.

Caretakers were genuinely some of the most likable and relatable people you could work with. Much like the office staff, you could get lost in conversation for ages while chomping down on some toast. It was very much a “lads” group of people but they were extremely welcoming, and always took the piss out of each other. In one school I was at, the head caretaker was a 4th dan black belt who seemed to know every martial art style. He actually trained me for around 6-8 months before he got injured (Of course, I didn’t injure him, he injured himself 😂). I remember one time he was showing me his boxing days in the military, and when we started, his eyes changed completely and he was super, super serious. He held back, but each time he hit me in the face felt like my entire brain was moving around my skull. I really miss it, because I was starting to get pretty good at it. We did everything from judo, kendo, karate, aikido, boxing, acrobatics… it was crazy fun.

Students were somewhere in between, although I’d say much closer to the good end. Above I said 40% of teachers were assholes, I’d probably say 5% of students were assholes, that’s how much of a difference it was. They were cheeky as hell of course, and always found ways around internet blocks or any other obstacles we’d put in their way. Most of them were just genuinely confused anxious messes, which is of course totally expected at that age. The most common thing we’d get from students was forgotten passwords, it was a dozen times a day. I have to say though, working in IT made you see some of the worst things on CCTV like bullying. We were regularly visited by the police for evidence gathering unfortunately. It was one of the less enjoyable parts of the job, and a reminder that working in a school wasn’t always about fixing computers.

The Working Environment

People who say IT isn’t an active job clearly haven’t worked it. I’m not saying it’s the most active, by any stretch, but the schools I was in were huge, and would take 10 minutes just to walk from one end to the other at a decent pace. It’s crazy that even after all these years I still remember the full layouts of those buildings and who taught in each room. I definitely got my steps in working as an IT guy. In most of my jobs we used radios to contact each other because we’d all be scattered around the site.

I’ve worked alone and in teams, and I have to say the IT rooms were the best. They had so much character and were surprisingly tidy. The server rooms, in comparison, were always an absolute mess. Nobody, even the Network Managers 😂, would dare change anything in here just in case it broke something, unless they absolutely had no choice. Figuring out where our cables went was the biggest mystery, because they were undocumented and fitted long before us in every school I was at. They were usually ice cold and VERY loud.

My first IT job, I was in this tiny room for 5ish years! It was pretty cozy honestly, until a kid would randomly slam the door and burst my ear drums each time.

Then there was the money. IT were given pennies in the overall school budget in my experience, so we really had to make it stretch very thin and take shortcuts all the time. If I recall, a “good” budget would be around £40k, which might sound like a lot but that includes annual contracts for things like software licenses. As budgets got smaller each year, we’d have to sacrifice new PCs for refurbished PCs, which honestly was one of the best decisions we ever made and saved us an absolute fortune. I think in the end we bought hundreds of Dell Optiplexs and redid half the school.

Server room hell.

Talking about money, my pay was awful. Technicians got the minimum wage in most cases, with network managers being able to double the wage of a Technician, which was a lot more respectable. I think I was on about £16k – 18k for most of my IT career.

And then there was OFSTED. We loved OFSTED in IT, because it panicked everyone else into suddenly making the school look like the best thing that ever existed. A lot of people are surprised to hear how much notice you get as a school that OFSTED are coming in: a day.  I’m still of the opinion that they should just turn up on the day and analyse a school on a normal day without any prep ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Storytime: Jamie the Printer King

I’ve spoken about a lot of negatives, because there were a lot. Even so, the good bits made me really, really miss working in schools because it was so much fun. My proudest achievement came from working with a kid named Jamie. To preface this a bit, this was while I was working in an SEN school (Special Educational Needs), and our first interaction was me dodging a punch from him suddenly in the corridor. SEN schools are something else, and it takes the patience of a saint to work there, but it was incredibly rewarding to see them develop and go on to do great things in and outside of school.

Anyway, back to Jamie. Years later he showed interest in my job, and would watch me sometimes fix things, especially printers. If he did an IT lesson, he was always asking about me and if I needed help fixing anything. I can’t remember if I suggested it or someone else did, but he was offered a work experience placement with me which I was very excited to do (But nervous, as I was very young and inexperienced teaching anyone anything. It went well, he was very limited by what he could do both physically and mentally, but he picked things up very fast and was changing toners in printers, replacing paper etc.

To him, replacing a toner in a printer was the biggest achievement ever and it made me really happy to see this and his progress. His work experience abruptly ended, and he was set to leave school shortly after as it was end of year. I wasn’t happy with how abruptly his tutoring ended, it was if it was seen as a checkbox rather than treating it as one of the most important things in his life. I met with the deputy headteacher and I pitched giving Jamie an award in front of the school. They agreed, I asked for something physical to present but for whatever reason it didn’t work out, so I made him a fancy certificate, got it laminated and began working on some words. It was at this time that the thoughts of presenting this in front of 200 people finally dawned on me. I was an anxious mess without presenting an award, so this was a true test of my confidence which I was determined to break through.

So there I was, called up to the front, it was dead silent and until a teacher said “Hi…. Simon?” from the crowd which made me even more nervous 😂 I remembered why I was doing it and began reading the words off the paper I had written. I presented it to Jamie, who was overjoyed and quickly grabbed the certificate with excitement. I felt really good after that, and I heard he went on to do some IT in college.

Storytime: The Wet Knob

When I got my first job, I was a nervous wreck. For the last couple of years I had my Dad supporting me, but now? I was totally on my own as the lone technician in a special needs school. It felt like the deep end and it was pretty intense even looking back now. In the end it turned out to be exactly what I needed, but at the time I was an anxious mess that nearly gave up. I do wonder what my life would’ve been like if I walked away from that opportunity. ANYWAY, on my first day I cautiously walked towards the place I’d call “my office” for the next 5 years. I walked up to the door, took a deep anxious breath, put the key in and twisted the door knob. To my absolute shock and horror, it was soaked in spit. I mean, totally, 100% coated in actual spit. I was horrified LOL… and I thought “IS THIS MY LIFE NOW?” funnily enough, it never happened again in the next 5 years. I do wonder how someone got their mouth around that weirdly shaped door handle. Some things are best left unknown.

In Retrospect…

I thoroughly enjoyed my time as both an IT Technician and eventually a Network Manager. It was some of the most fun I’ve ever had and I would honestly love to go back and do it again… if only it paid well :(. The best parts were seeing the changes I made impact students learning, it was really rewarding. The goofing off was also up there, I met some insane characters over the years.

It was a problem solving job at its heart, and fixing something (Software or hardware) gave me great satisfaction and confidence. It was very stressful work at times, but that made me into the person I am today so I wouldn’t take that stress back. The job really gave me better social skills, which I sorely needed after hermiting on my computer for years leading up to it.