reflections on a year of desk work

Written by Patrick J Turner Jr

Published on November 28th, 2025

Well my friends, as of September 2nd, 2025 I have been working as a Network Applications Engineer for Extron Electronics for a whole year. I reckon that earns me a smidgen of reflection on my career path up to now and perhaps even a pat on the back, if I should allow myself one.

Let me start by saying how truly lucky I am. I like this job. I like it as much as a person can reasonably be expected to enjoy laboring for a living. I did not find this job myself, it found me. Specifically, a recruiter from Florida matched my LinkedIn profile to the position I currently hold. If I am to be given any credit it should only be that for the months prior to being scouted I had been quietly optimizing my LinkedIn page to pivot from working desktop IT support into a computer networking job. That work happened to pay off without my necessarily even expecting it to.

My prior position in desktop IT support at the UNC REX Main Hospital in Raleigh was similarly facilitated by recruiters. While on the job, I ate lunch with my recruiter Jake at least once a month to check in, shoot the shit, and presumably help him keep tabs on the other contract workers. Jake worked for TEKSystems, an IT contract work company that scouts IT workers and places them where their experience is needed. I was recommended to them by one of my college professors as I was graduating. Coming out of college with my many, many job applications to programming roles either denied, ignored, or if I was lucky: dropped after a short interview- an entry level IT job sounded a whole heck of a lot better than nothing.

So I got placed at the local hospital in Boone with a boss who yelled at us for the love of the game. He was this big dude who went to school to be a priest but somehow washed up as the de facto head of IT for the regional medical center. Think he somehow managed to power trip on the miniscule amount of responsibility afforded to him in that role. He treated everyone like shit, and if anyone called him out he would just say "Add it to my file." I hated him so much I actively contemplated extreme acts of violence or sabotage against him. Instead, I put on my khaki pants and polo and walked to work each day from my apartment 5 minutes down the road. I worked with several dudes carrying an assortment of GEDs, community college associate degrees, and random IT certifications. One of them got arrested at work after the cops searched his apartment and found child pornography.

We were tasked with the thankless role of running around the mountains standardizing the equipment and software of the dated rural private healthcare system in the name of the growing UNC Health banner. The Watauga county medical system had been effectively bought out by UNC, but according to any higher ups you asked we were simply merging with them, or working alongside them. Practically every hospital in North Carolina is managed under some big healthcare company be it Atrium, Novant, WakeMed, or UNC. They literally don't have the money to be operated any other way now, and the inflow of funding and standardized use of the Epic Systems healthcare software does generally help make these rural clinics run more efficiently. All this responsibility for 15 bucks an hour.

After my lease ran out in Boone I moved to Raleigh with some dudes I went to high school with. My boss graciously recommended me to continue working for UNC at their main hospital in the city. I had been hoping, praying really, that one of the many, many jobs I applied for in Raleigh would get back to me before I moved there but fate or the economy or whatever had other plans. Luckily, those plans did include a pay increase to about 23 dollars an hour. After passing a drug test and receiving every vaccine known to man, I was cleared to work at UNC REX Main.

My new job came with my own desk in the IT office tucked in the basement of the hospital. Every IT office is shoved in some godforsaken corner of a building complex, and ours was in the belly of the great leviathan that is UNC REX Main. The room was formerly used to house huge racks of servers when everything ran on-premises, but those had since been cut down to a few bare racks with some local firewall and security functions. The room still had the distinction of having buttons on either end that when pressed would release halon gas through the fire suppression system. One of the seniors on my team used to joke that if one of those buttons was pressed, everyone would have 10 seconds to leave the office. He had an odd sense of humor. Most people who work with computers do.

Since UNC REX Main had long since become enveloped under the UNC brand, my new job consisted mostly of managing the many tickets that came through our IT management platform. The majority of these tickets were to replace mice, keyboards, monitors, whole computers, label printers, barcode scanners, or some other obscure piece of technology prescribed to a nurse years ago and since worn down by constantly being sterilized or dropped while attending to patients. There was often very little sense in trying to fix a broken piece of hardware- if it was old we had a pile of new ones to replace it. This was a cost begrudgingly approved on the hospital balance sheet after much haggling by our lovely IT leadership. I adored my bosses in Raleigh, they were real salt of the earth type IT people. No nonsense, just find the problem and fix it efficiently with care. There was always some complaining of problem customers, but at the end of the day the job needed to get done and we sure as hell got it done.

One time I fixed a computer in an operating room while someone was in for surgery. Someone had their abdomen cut open all while I was sweating bullets trying to ensure the computer monitoring their status was doing what it needed to. Many days I worked in the hospital gift shop trying to fix their horrific point of sale system. I met a lot of neat people and worked in all sorts of different departments. Gave me a new appreciation for hospitals. Some people find the stark white walls, bright lights, and strong smells of industrial cleaning supplies to be off-putting, not to mention the nightmare that is dealing with insurance and healthcare premiums in this country, or the fact that people die or suffer every day in hospitals. From where I was standing, I saw the hospital as a factory that deals in people. Sick and hurt people go in, healthy people go out. It is a messy, inefficient, savage, and brutal machine yet I love it all the same.

I climbed up stairs, fast walked through hallways on top of hallways. Any hospital older than a decade inevitably becomes some freakish insult to logical building design as new wings get added on year after year to accommodate new departments. The Cafeteria? Oh you'll have to walk through the front entrance, past outpatient pharmacy, past Endo, past MRI, past the chapel, past a clinic, down an elevator, past day infusion, don't go right toward the inpatient pharmacy and the birthing center- instead go left past the courtyard and then right into the cafeteria. If you keep walking another quarter mile down the longest hallway known to man, you'll find yourself in the new heart hospital built next door to the old hospital. I must have told a dozen people daily how to get to where they wanted to go as they aimlessly wandered the hallways.

Throughout all this I ate lunch once a month with my recruiter Jake. We earnestly discussed work and life at these meetings and it was always a joy to speak with him. I mean, it was ultimately still a part of both of our jobs to do this, but it was a part you look forward to and enjoy. I looked up to Jake in a lot of ways since he was about 5 years older than me and going through a lot of the life events I hope to go through. He discussed his recent engagement and moving to a new city with his finance. He gave me advice on managing getting into new jobs and stuff. Jake was (is) a great dude. He gave me a lot of respect for recruiters, even if they are ultimately sort of middlemen scraping their cut off the already terminally bloated and slow hiring process of most corporate jobs. If you're lucky, then they can at least help you land a job that merely sending an application in for would only return radio silence.

One fine day I received a LinkedIn message from a recruiter working for an agency based in Florida about a position as a network technician for an AV company in Raleigh. I assumed it was too good to be true. In my experience, most LinkedIn messages are either advertisements, scams, or recruiters who ultimately choose not to follow through on a candidate after a screening interview. To be seriously considered for a networking position without even having my Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certificate felt impossible- and yet here it was contacting me without much effort on my part. Even more so considering I was already studying for that certification and planning to get it over the summer in order to better position myself to get precisely the type of job I was getting called about.

Now it's not like I had zero networking experience. In college I worked part time as a network technician on my university campus. Mostly that job consisted of setting up Cisco IP phones for new college employees, but it did teach me a bit of the terminology and networking know-how. I also had taken an elective class my senior year on networking that I half slept through. With this, and the studying I had done for the CCNA, I had enough in my back pocket to convincingly bluff competency in an interview*. The recruiter thought I sounded good and passed me along for a second interview with the two men who would become my boss and my manager. They were chipper ex-military guys (common in networking I've found) willing to take a chance on me, and I was hired by the end of the summer. My first day was the day after labor day.

From my time working in networking on campus and trying to deal with the network guys in the hospital, I discovered perhaps the most important part of why people choose to go into this field: you can work from home ALL the time, and unlike software engineering you typically don't have to do all that much. This is partly a revelation of the COVID-era remote work policies, but most networking positions have reliably stayed either hybrid or fully remote. Do your job right and everything should work 90% of the time. The 10% of the time that something does go wrong or something needs to be moved, you get to leave your house and do a few hours of work on site. What could be better? This sort of thing is the holy grail for any technical worker. Typically, people who work with computers all day would much rather sit in the comfort of their own home, interfacing with their computer over dealing with the few social obligations expected of them for in-office work.

My job currently requires me to be on site every day except in cases of sickness, snow, or needing to stay home and having it cleared with the boss. So, my ultimate goal is still out of reach at the moment, but make no mistake; I'm aiming for a job where I get to work in comfort in a nice home office. Corporate shills and bigwigs will try to espouse the merits of working in person, but they can't dispel what anyone who has worked remotely already knows: working at home is more comfortable, convenient, and saves tons of time and money. I believe the push to return to work is largely driven by generational social divides, corporate office rental policies, and other forces to exert control over workers. Studies have consistently shown the benefits of remote work, and while it may not work for some individuals or even most jobs, it sure as hell works for me and the job I want to do.

When I started working at Extron I was put through a comprehensive training program called the ITP (Internal Training Program). This covered the ins and outs of the audio/video industry including a lot of wiring, protocol standards, and technical specs. It was a grueling process of watching videos for 8 hours a day that took the better part of three months. I also had to familiarize myself with Extron's products, how they worked, how to troubleshoot them, and what to recommend to customers building out a comprehensive AV system. Additionally included in this program was phone training since my new position required me to monitor incoming customer technical support calls via CRM (Customer Relations Manager) software. This was all new to me as someone working in educational and healthcare environments up to now, and I hadn't really been told that I would be doing call center work at the time of my initial interview.

Prior to this job I had only really performed technical support in person, where most of the time the customer (who often knew very little about computers) was satisfied to step back and watch me fix their problem for them. I liked this setup just fine as it allowed me to flex my technical know-how and get my ego stroked by nice nurses and hospital clerical staff. (Doctors were typically the worst to work with because they're entitled, always in a rush, and rarely in the mood to give thanks.) Working technical support over the phone introduced a complicated new texture to this established dynamic as I now had to walk the end user through how to fix their problem, or remote into their computer and explain how to fix it in detail. Luckily most of our customers are either AV technicians or network technicians: guys who have at least touched a computer and know a thing or two about how to do their jobs.

Another big difference with working at Extron was working stationary at a single desk in a cubicle all day long. I was used to running around hospitals all day. My work inherently involved a degree of physicality that was now completely removed in the office environment. My eye strain got considerably worse under the harsh florescent lights that never turned off. My wrists got tired from holding a mouse and keyboard all day. I began to suffer bad posture and gained weight. Typical effects of desk work, I had heard of them for years but always assumed I would be too good for them to ever reach me. Well, I'm sure as hell not laughing now.

Ultimately though, these things are minor inconveniences for the many upsides the job presents. I get to do interesting, specialized work in a salaried position. I do hardware testing and resolve troubleshooting more complicated than just "replace the mouse," or "turn it on and back off again." I have health and dental insurance, something working at the hospital ironically did not offer me. Life is easy for me now and I have never once dreaded going to work. My coworkers are nice and funny and I enjoy speaking with my manager and boss.

Maybe one of the only downsides is that suddenly getting more than I ever wanted screwed with my goals for a period of time. I put off studying for my CCNA for a while (I got it at the end of this summer) because I saw no real point in getting it- especially since getting a job was my motivation for studying. My career had become my short term focus, and now that I had become the dog who caught the car I didn't know what to do with myself. Eventually I settled into the job and allowed myself to wind down some. To enjoy the fruits of my labor and think more big picture. My girlfriend has just moved to the city and we're moving in together. Because I have a stable, well paying job I am free to focus and plan several years into the future. I enjoy the simple pleasures like cooking and cleaning. Yes, my life is good right now. I am happy.

One of the things that makes me unhappy is seeing my friends continue to struggle post-undergrad. You don't need me to tell you that the job market sucks and landing a job requires some arcane mixture of luck, connections, experience, and patience. Chances are you've experienced for yourself the endless applications, debasing yourself on LinkedIn, or prepping for inane interviews doomed to go nowhere. We've all received the rejection emails and callbacks, or worse, received none at all. Everyone is unemployed or underemployed and nowhere is hiring. I know people who are far smarter than I am have languished in this limbo far longer than I did. I think even the best career planning in the world can't prepare you for how demoralizing that atmosphere truly is once you're caught in it.

All that to say, I am not just lucky to have found this job, or for it to have found me. I am deeply privileged to be in a salaried position with enough income to cover my needs and contribute a fair amount to savings. It seems there a shrinking number of fields one can enter that reliably pay a fair wage which will cover the ever skyrocketing costs of living. God help you if you went into the arts or the humanities or education. Capitalism, and especially American Capitalism has so devalued honest cultural knowledge and human expression and continues to do so every year. Our economy an ouroboros rapidly eating itself. I don't know where that process will end. All I know is things are looking more and more bleak every day and I worry for my friends and the people in my community who aren't as fortunate as I am. I want to grow and help them. I want to be part of a real community of people, not this endless rat race of money and power

Many delusional folks became computer science students believing they will go into a high paying programming job fresh out of college and it'll be smooth sailing from there. That may be true for some talented few, but for the rest of us our delusions have to meet reality at some point. For me that meant taking a shitty job I hated and getting paid crumbs before getting transferred to an okay job I tolerated and getting paid a bit better and then positioning myself for what I really wanted to do and somehow getting paid well. Computer science is still one of the few fields in America you can still do that with- if you're interested in it (which most people aren't (who can blame them?)) Everything else has kind of been gutted because it doesn't make a profit. It's part of the reason I despise the minds of business and finance people who seem to operate exclusively in the language of profit.

I've been at this job for a year. The world has become a scarier place in that year. Maybe I just have more to lose now, but I find myself more scared of the future than ever before. I'm going to continue working at this job for the years to come, until I am either fired or laid off or have a mental break and quit to pursue my real dream of driving all over the Americas, taking pictures, drinking, and eating until my savings run out. Or maybe the world will Just end before all that. Maybe that's just wishful thinking. Good night.

*Side tangent time: I was also interviewing for another networking job in parallel to the one I eventually got. This was for a Network Operations Center Technician role that would have had really weird hours and required me to know some obscure network knowledge that I don't even understand at my current level of experience. I somehow bluffed my way through THREE whole interviews for this company before they ghosted me altogether. Supposedly the position they were interviewing for was brand new, so its possible they decided not to go through with creating the position- or that my third interviewer believed I was a fraud. Which I was. Who knows! I think that job would have sucked compared to the one I have now anyway.