I chose the Microsoft Store over a UPS truck driver route. Less money, less stability, but it was technology. For the kid who was diagnosed with ADHD before eight, who struggled through school, who spent years working three jobs to pay for community college, walking into a Microsoft Store as an employee felt like arriving somewhere.

My first year, I was top in sales. That got me promoted to front-end tech. I wasn't just selling anymore. I was diagnosing, fixing, teaching. Everything I'm good at now started in that store. How to explain a technical problem to someone who doesn't care about the technical part. How to diagnose fast with a line of people waiting. How to actually listen to what someone needs instead of jumping to the answer.

Microsoft products became second nature. Windows, Surface, Office 365, the whole ecosystem. I wasn't learning from documentation. I was learning from people walking in with broken laptops, crashed systems, and no patience. That's a better teacher than any cert program.

Then a friend told me about an MSP that was hiring. I applied and got in.

The shift was immediate. At a Microsoft Store, you fix one device at a time and hand it back. At an MSP, you're responsible for entire organizations. The organizations I inherited were nothing like the enterprise environments Microsoft prepared me for. Town halls running on 15-year-old servers. Police departments with no security policy. Nonprofits doing critical work on a technology budget of almost nothing. Schools where the "IT department" was a teacher who happened to know how to reset a router.

These are the organizations most IT companies don't want. Thin margins. Old infrastructure. Messy problems. But the people running them are serving their communities, and they deserve the same quality of support as anyone else.

I became site lead for several of them. The executive director, the police chief, the department head. They had my direct number. When something broke, I was the call.

One night I pulled an all-nighter to make sure a building had internet the next morning. Spent hours tracing the issue. Turned out someone had plugged a phone into itself, creating a network loop that took down the whole building. That's the job. Hours of work for a cable plugged into the wrong port. And if I hadn't been there, that building doesn't open the next day.

Nine years of that changes how you think. You stop seeing technology as a product and start seeing it as the thing that determines whether a town hall can process permits, whether a school's network holds up during state testing, whether a nonprofit can submit their grant report on time.

I'm still at the MSP. I'm building Griffin Atlas alongside it because I want the freedom to build and grow on my own terms. Everything I've learned in nine years of supporting organizations that run on tight budgets and can't afford mistakes goes into what I'm building now. The same discipline, the same honesty, the same willingness to pick up the phone at 2am.

The difference is now I'm also building the tools.

- Roger