Not so long ago Windows 98 had it's 10th Birthday. PC-Pitstop, to celebrate this, ran a benchmark across the three major releases of Microsoft operating systems since the release of Windows 98, namely - 98, XP and Vista. The results weren't really all to surprising... or were they? What's not surprising is how Microsoft have stopped allowing manufacturers to supply OEM versions or any versions for that matter of Windows XP. Perhaps this is because the only way you can get children to eat vegetables is to give them no other choice? This particular vegetable is totally average.

http://techtalk.pcpitstop.com/2008/04/03/windows-98-turns-70-in-dog-years/

Recently whilst riding my bike to work, I pondered the correlation of a person in charge of hands-on IT technical issues and a doctor. The similarities are quite astounding, whilst I also don't want you to think that computers, just like humans, require a doctor. Well, they do in a way. It's all about diagnosis. On a daily basis I am faced with problems that arise within my company and I am the head in charge of diagnosing those problems and prescribing a solution, not much unlike a GP that sits behind a desk in a medical center. Cases walk in and out of the door and you assess them based on symptoms and then issue them with a prescription on how to correct the problem. IT technical is just the same. Though the analogy isn't completely accurate because the computers themselves don't walk in to your office to explain the symptoms, rather, a "close friend" of the PC troddles on over to tell you about the problems "one of his/her friends" is having.

My analogy isn't far from off when you also think about the "surgery" involved with IT. Much as the same way a doctor has to make split second decisions when operating on a live patient, an IT technician has to react similarly whilst working with servers that are also "live" in a different kind of way. Downtime doesn't equal death, but that depends on how angry the users of that server get.

Which is why I've decided that doctors would make good IT technicians and visa-versa. Both job types have exactly the same traits, swapping Latin for Bash script, I guess. They both work with diagnosing problems and prescribing solutions and they both work with "live" systems that require fast responses to continually developing and changing problems. Weighing up cutting off someones leg after it's going septic can quite loosely be similar to cutting your losses on a certain method to correct a server issue. It's those decisions that have to be made right then and there, and whilst people may think that most jobs out there have similar responsibilities... I think they're wrong. Until you're the sole person responsible for the smooth running of entire IT infrastructure, working on permanently live servers and software, or until you're a doctor standing over a patient as they go under anaestetic prior to surgery, you will never know how strong the correlation between those two job types really are.

I'm not going to become a doctor anytime soon, though I think because of the training I've had with diagnosing problems, I wouldn't be far off from a successful doctor. This new realisation has made me respect doctors more in a way, and I hope that feeling is mutual. The next time I meet a doctor we can stand in the corner of a LAN party together as equals and laugh at our position of equal oppurtunity.

 Image taken from Xkcd