Tall, Dark & Digital

I’m elated to finally be in this relationship. I’ve been waiting for a few months now to get to this point. I’ve got the butterflies in my stomach, I go to bed thinking about my beau and wake up super excited to be reunited. But I can feel this relationship is starting to be something I entered with blinders, and only seeing the shiny and wonderful in it all.

When cyber was still just a twinkle in my eye I sought advice from everyone I could. Every single one of those people told me how much I would love it, how interesting it is, and what a great career path it is. This is all true but why did no one tell me I would want to throw myself and my laptop out of the window at least 15 times a day!

3 weeks in and I already have a love-hate relationship with my laptop…and every other piece of tech in my house, including my fridge which has gone to the dark side too and doesn’t provide me the same joy it used to when I opened it.

We covered networking today (specifically WireShark) and?this?is how I wanted to spend my whole day, but I stopped myself, I knew I would quickly regret it, 2 minutes of satisfaction was not worth it! Every single time I had an “aha” moment, I got knocked right back down to remind me I still have a lot to learn. And I’m glad. I certainly wouldn’t be where I am now if knew it all. Luckily I had a great group of friends who were mostly just as frustrated as I was, and awesome?tutors?who kept encouraging us, to get me through, or I may have ended up in a ball crying about how evil networking is and that it’s out to get me.

Now that I’ve had some time away from my new companion, I can see how networking fits into the bigger puzzle of cyber security that’s starting to form in my head. It’s like we got to look at a whole encyclopedia today and we used the index, the contents, and the little citations to “see page ..” to jump from one bit of information to another and another, soaking in as much as we could as quickly as we could. All in all, I know way more now than I did this morning, despite the detours down frustration lane, anger alley and I give up street. I think networking is going to be the evil mother-in-law in my new relationship so I’m still not fully convinced that networking isn’t out to get me, but baby steps, cyber relies on networking and I’m relying on cyber so we all need each other.

Don’t get me wrong, I?LOVE?what I’m doing and I’m so excited to keep going and reach a point where I know my partner as well as I can. But I’m no longer under any illusion that cyber and I are going to be smooth sailing from here on out, it’s going to be a bit more of a roller coaster, and in all honesty, I love a good roller coaster :)