DizzySchool stories time. This is the story of how I got into sysadmin work by helping out the criminally underpaid network admin in highschool, an unpaid "job" I got by impressing her by fucking around with their network.
So first, some background. The network admin was officially the librarian. They had, shortly prior to my attending, "demoted" her to the librarian because of budget cuts, but still expected her to perform all the duties of a network administrator.
She, understandably, stopped giving a fuck.
One day in the A+ (computer repair cert) class, I figured out that the directory for the CAD class on the otherwise fairly locked down public fileshare was writable, and allowed you to execute programs from it.
I immediately set about downloading and installing a portable copy of Quake 3 into that share.
Brazenly, I started setting up impromptu LAN parties in the library after school. The librarian did not give two shits, and it earned me some measure of weird popularity among the nerds, though few actual friends.
To these nerds, I was basically just this.
One of them once saw me pop upon an SSH session to the VPS I rented with my allowance and said "He's hacking the mainframe". This is the level of understanding we're talking about.
Anyway, so eventually the Vice Principal caught one of our LAN sessions. He was very angry, and very concerned about the violence corrupting the poor children.
Some clever clogs decided to dob me in as the one who had made this possible. I was originally to be suspended, but the librarian/netadmin somehow convinced them to "punish" me by making me work with her instead.
My general duties were to run antivirus/antispyware software on the school computers and install Firefox and disguise it as IE6 to try to prevent more viruses from getting in.
She did not stop the LAN parties. Instead she got all the kids involved to promise to ALT-TAB when they saw the VP coming.
Eventually this unpaid work doing the job of an underpaid and underappreciated netadmin for her got me an "Excellence in Emerging Technology" certificate.
It also got me trusted enough to try to explain to the superintendent why the setup he'd mandated for their email system enabled anyone to impersonate a teacher. No auth whatsoever.
He did not understand, nor listen.
I grew a deep appreciation for this librarian. She was being shit on from a great height but she clearly also knew what she was doing, and cared about my burgeoning development as an IT person.
She taught me things, taught me how to better administrate that VPS I was renting. Encouraged me to explore.
Eventually, years later, this would wind up with me working for a small ISP set up by a friend.
These days, I do sysadmin work for small communities as a hobby. I'm on disability, and hate corporations.
I'm too anxious for paid work in the field, and would probably hate it anyway.
Fun epilogue:
That school had one local admin password for all their computers. It was their school initials.
They also were running Windows 2000 still by the time I graduated in 2006. They were too cheap to buy XP licenses.
Tyler@dizzy Did this ever come back to bite them? It blows my mind that someone would make their admin password so simple.
@robustjumprope not that I'm aware of. As far as I knew at least by the time I graduated I was the only student who had figured this out, and I basically just used it to make my job easier
Edna (elle) 
• Sleeping Beauty of Spiders@dizzy I love the story, thank you so much, made me smile <3
Mike Spooner@dizzy They probably still are.