iamnerdy
Established in the 1980s. Chicago, IL
Personal
Dropped out of High School at 14 Self Taught Father of 4
Professional
20+ Years in I.T. Helped over 10 million people En route to world domination.
I can remember the first time I ever experienced what a computer was.
It was 1989.
My parents ran a business out of the garage at the time. My mother was the driving force behind the technology. She would run the books and inventory at the time from the computer and from paper. It was a work of masterpiece looking back it at now. This was an old Macintosh computer, the one with the 18” floppy drive. I can’t remember much of what I did on there but I remember there being a small-screen and a single mouse button. I’m quite sure I played games on there.
Technology would continue to be present throughout my household during the 1990’s and of course into the 2000’s and beyond.
It wasn’t until the year 1998 when everything changed. I was 14 years old at the time, just starting my freshman year of high school. Something happened in me that still to this day 25 years later is unexplainable.
I woke up one day and just didn’t want to wake up.
I didn’t want to do anything. This was odd because I wouldn’t say I was a popular student by any means but I had a lot of friends and I loved playing football.
I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety a short time later, but I would never return to high school again.
Instead of letting depression take hold and completely destroy my life(it definitely destroyed many parts of my life, but not all). I was determined to do something with my life, even if at the time I didn’t realize it.
Where it all began. My moms basement and AOL.
The book that made this entire journey possible.
So I picked up a book called HTML for Dummies and I taught myself HTML.
Randomly enough, I had a couple of friends who were also nerds who dabbled in websites. The rest was history.
From 1999 onward I learned how to make websites.
I learned HTML, CSS, PHP, search engine optimization, and overall internet marketing.
It wasn’t until around 10 years later that I discovered I also had a passion for Information Technology.
Back in the early 2000’s everyone assumed if you knew even a little something about computers that you knew absolutely EVERYTHING about technology. This simply isn’t the case, not then, not now, or ever.
I loved technology, learning about it, and being immersed in it, but I found that what I really loved was helping people.
Over the years of doing web development and working odd jobs, I was really able to hone in on my passion for helping people and that discovery of the infrastructure side of IT was so appealing to me. So I transitioned.
I was never a person to shy away from doing work or letting something I didn’t know stop me. Google wasn’t at all what it used to be back then, and I would have to dive deeper into the web and make contacts with people to learn more information, but it was achievable.
As stated previously people assumed if you knew anything about computers you knew EVERYTHING about computers. So when people would stop and ask me random questions about their computer hardware, printers, devices, etc. I would do what I can to help them.
NERDS KNOW ALL THE THINGS!
As the years went on, this would happen more frequently until it reached a point where I decided I was going to go out on my own and help small businesses and residential customers.
This worked out well from 2008-2010 or so. Then I moved 100 miles away from everything that I knew for the last 26 years of my life to become a father. There’s a very long story involved, but this forever changed my life and began to put everything into perspective.
Moving 100 miles away from my home was not easy; quite honestly, it took years to recover from. But now, 10+ years after that happened in 2011, I am the most successful and happy that I have ever been.
I now have 4 children and I honestly have the best job in the world. Things have changed so much in my life in the last 20 odd years and just trying to write everything out is extremely emotional and exhausting.
As this blog hopefully continues I will try to continuously update this page with more about me, life, business, and so on. What you will find is links inserted into the story above that will take you to a blog to explain things further, if you’re interested of course.
I hope you enjoy the stories.
-Zach
