Pouya Lucky

That 486

My family moved to Dubai from Tehran sometime around the 90’s. I grew up in a mixture of west and east in a technologically decent environment. Even as a kid I loved computers. In fact I bought my very first PC when I was a teen. I looked in the classifieds section of Gulf News and found a perfect used candidate PC. A beautiful 486DX equipped with MS DOS and all 33 Mhz of computing power, 2MB of RAM, and round 200 MB of HDD and a 3.5″ FDD (Floppy Disk Drive for you modern-people out there). That was the time I found a passion of computers and the story continued with me purchasing bits and pieces for that PC every month and ended up with a machine running Windows 95 complete with Audio CD capabilities.That 486 remains the best purchase of my life, as it was the thing that made me develop a passion for computers.

Dark side of IT

Fast forward to 2007 when I studied my bachelor in the field of Information-technology with a concentration in network infrastructure design &maintenance. Getting to know computers professionally was a dream come true form and I loved the field, and enjoyed every second of configuring a router,figuring out issues, troubleshooting networks, setting up a DNS server, and fiddling around with Active Directory. I immediately joined a project work after my graduation. The project was field test engineer for Etisalat in UAE under the supervision of Amir Mortezaie, a brilliant telecom consultant who has been a great inspiration and until today is one of my closest friends. Once the project was over in a few months time, I joined a service desk analyst position with such an enthusiasm and found the dark side of the IT world.Sitting in a cubicle and answering phone calls. Day in, day out. Punching my ticked-in in the morning and ticket-out in the evening. Even though I was getting a generous salary and had job security working for one of the biggest oil extraction companies globally (Schlumberger), I woke up every single morning miserable. So I took the leap of faith and quit a job that was not making me happy and decided to shift to provide me with a more face 2 face interaction since my extrovert personality and love for presentation urged me to do so.

If you enjoyed reading part 1, please continue to Part 2.