Being happy at Sprint Paranet didn't mean things stayed easy — if anything, it meant the demands ramped up harder. I moved from systems administrator to Unix engineer right as the whole industry was racing toward Y2K, which meant I was on the road constantly, updating systems against a deadline nobody could push back. I wore the exhaustion like a badge of honor at the time. Burnout doesn't always look like burnout while you're living it — sometimes it just looks like being needed. Somewhere...