Eman Travel Log
by Eman
When I travel I travel like a child. I find that eyes and ears open to the journey and the destinations is the best way to accept where you are and the local culture. Yes it is best to throw off the trappings of your home and personal environment so that the new one can be appreciated. So I travel like a child with all my senses open.
What I have seen this past year alone has been a real thrill and if I sound enthusiastic about my work that is because I truly am blessed and very happy. Technology has been a vehicle for me to journey to new discovery and it always has been. I look back on my career and as a Mainframe operator in the 1970s I thought the world was a miraculous place because of the computer. There were no PCs yet so the monster I was running took up a lot of space and was taller than me. I remember there were four banks of these systems and the room buzzed with raised flooring forced air and an electric charge was palpable in the air. Sure I had to manually load the bootstrap as a string of over a hundred binary coded octal commands occasionally but otherwise these beasts did what they were supposed to do. Then these first systems I ran for the US Navy were replaced in civilian life with Big Blue IBM monsters. I worked for the Credit Bureau in Dallas and ran batch jobs from punch cards. Loaded paper in printers replaced large disk platters in our memory drives and basically worked like a dog! I took a programming course at the local junior college using my veteran’s benefits to further my career. What I learned was that I was not going to be a programmer! Computers got smaller and then I played with Peachtree on an early IBM dual floppy drive PC. Man what was the world coming to when a person could pop a couple of flimsy floppies into a hunk of metal and compute? WOW as a Star Trek fan I was beginning to believe we could someday arrive at a point of convergence with the Enterprise and crew of the Star Trek! I graduated to IBM AS/400s and on to client server computers and the first mouse driven GUI interface I used was from Microsoft. Windows and then Windows for work groups taught me that networking could be fun especially when we started playing Doom over lunch with all of the geeks sitting in their cubicles and hooting and hollering like loons. What an exciting time to be a geek. I was then turned on to email and cc:Mail became like a second career for me. I soon was creating hub and spoke and pint-to-point schemes which made the early email users under my charge very excited. There were Novel servers for print and files storage and Windows servers for applications and email. Then I got a call from a representative in the support group from Bay networks. He asked me to go over to the router and help him reconfigure it with him. I had no idea what I was doing. So I sat there on the phone and he tried to dial into the unit. I was clueless as you can tell and he could not get into the box. So I rebooted it and connected what at the time was a portable Compaq PC to it. The PC could only be described as a lunch box even though it was more like the size of a large tool box. With the tech on the phone I configured a few routes and was done, never to touch another again for almost 10 years. In that time I became an IT manager and eventually managed one of the largest teams of CCIEs in the country for BANI. What this bunch of guys taught me would shape my future.
With each step in my career I proceeded with eyes open and senses at the ready. Much like I travel today for my work supporting the Cisco SRS program and the talent initiative around the world. When I first traveled abroad in the Navy all I saw were the western Pacific and the Orient. I had never before traveled across the Atlantic Ocean. Then just over a year ago I joined the folks in London at Bridge Resourcing Solutions to drive my CCIE Agent concept internationally. I went straight away to London. We held the first CCIE Mixer there in the north Tower of Tower Bridge. I still get goose bumps remembering this evening in history. I traveled to Belgium to visit the Cisco HQ for Europe in Brussels. I visited the CCIE lab there and it was like heavenly harps were playing an overture in the background!
From that journey thru the Chunnel in both directions I was swept away by a whirlwind of activity as the SRS program grew legs. I have been looking back at the CCIE Flyer and this leads me to the purpose of publishing it each month. I had no grand ideas other than to keep people aware of what I was doing and how CCIEs should be treated and engaged. Then I was at Networkers after the first two issues of the CCIE Flyer were sent out via email and the August issue appeared as an on-line magazine. Several of the CCIEs in attendance knew me from my calls for interview with channel partners and some actually read the CCIE Flyer and knew me from that work. I was not expecting this and when Scott told me I was like a celebrity I was really shocked. The Wing House with IPExpert and Scott Morris was followed by reviews of training companies and a trip to IPExpert’s offices in San Jose. Vik Mahli and Mike Down were my hosts. Wayne Lawson has since become a regular on the phone. Then off to Toronto for a visit with VoiceBootcamp and Faisal Khan where I held another Mixer for the Toronto based CCIEs in my network and Faisal’s class. Back to Philadelphia and the next CCIE Mixer near the Ben Franklin Bridge with Beth Rowland from Cisco in attendance. Back to London and a trip to Belfont Lakes and then off to Atlanta for a three day summit sponsored by Cisco for the Channel Partners. Over to Dubai where I learned about UAE channel partners and the community of CCIEs that are working there. We held an impromptu CCIE Mixer with fifteen CCIEs. I visited with Narbik’s CCIE bootcamp there in Dubai and we began discussing joining up on some of our mutual efforts to support CCIEs. Narbik had been in touch with me and wanted to advertise in the CCIE Flyer we knew each other by reputation but had not connected. Then it was off to Egypt and my wonderful experience with Egyptian hospitality. I was very impressed and honored by this community of CCIEs. Then back to London for their first HR summit and then Athens, Greece for the two day technology fair. So now I am home and Johannesburg is in ten days where I will make a presentation to the Network Academy and the Cisco Channel partners from South Africa.
I had never been to any of these places before and when I arrived in them, I sniffed the air, thank my God and stepped right into the world I was in. To say I have been on a journey of wonder and delight is putting it mildly. I try to give thanks every day for the world I travel through because I travel like a child, eyes open and senses ready. Try it some time you may find it to be a renewal of mind and spirit!
Thank you!
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