Do I feel the pressure? Every single day. When you work in a global environment, when you are part of a team of enterprise technologists supporting vital systems that keep people working from wherever they are, the stakes are high. When something goes wrong, the pressure builds fast.

I remember the first time I felt the pressure in IT—it takes me back to my first day as Director of IT for Hawk’s Cay Resort. At the time, being Director meant I was the only one in the IT department after my boss and mentor, the original Director of IT, left for a new role. That first day alone was nerve-wracking, and then the credit card processing system went down. Back then, we had these giant Dell computers running Linux with dial-up modems for credit card transaction processing.

The entire resort was unable to process credit card transactions, and my office phone was blowing up. Having never dealt with the issue myself—only having seen it handled by Todd once or twice—I found myself in a tough spot. Unable to reach Todd, I started breaking down the components of the system and got the credit card processor on the phone. Quickly, I began analyzing the issue and implemented a step-by-step troubleshooting flow, just as I had been trained to do over the last two years. This was the first time I had to apply those skills on such a high scale.

I solved the issue; ultimately, the modem went bad, and I replaced it with a spare we had on the shelf. But did the pressure get heavy? Did fear kick in? Did adrenaline flow? You bet it did.

I once worked 60 hours straight with difficult people who wanted to skip the flow of troubleshooting. Specifically, a network engineer was so sure the problem wasn’t what I identified that we had to open cases with Citrix and VMware and spend three days chasing ghosts before they would finally open a case with Cisco—only to find that the root of the problem was exactly where I had suggested looking in the first place.

This situation turned the pressure up high, and when it was all said and done, if we had just followed the natural path of troubleshooting, we could have saved 58 hours of multiple people’s lives. But cockiness and ego from a difficult person destroyed all lines of reasonable thought and logical steps.

Never be difficult when troubleshooting—that’s what I learned from that situation. The issue can be anywhere, and it may not directly involve the systems you are supporting. In bigger environments, so many systems tie together to make a solution whole. You have to work as a team to solve issues; you have to interface with other departments to get things done. The bigger the environment, the more moving parts there are. My experience over the last four to five years has been pretty amazing when issues pop up. People cool under pressure—not me, but others are cool! But you must remain calm, open to opinions, and work as a team player to find a resolution.

When the pressure builds, it’s not a bad thing. Sometimes, in those moments, a little humor or side talk can release the valve that’s bottling everything up. One of the people I work with always talks about what he just ate for lunch or dinner when things get hot. It helps to lighten the mood and calm everyone down for the moment. I appreciate that about him. Besides being one of the smartest guys I know, he’s also the nicest, and without ego.

So do I feel the pressure? Do I get stressed? I do, but it is in those moments where you have to kick back and let your training take over. You have to let people contribute at what they are best at, to work as a team to find a solution to a problem that is unknown. The more you work like this, the fewer problems you have. Being proactive in your monitoring, testing everything you are working on in lower levels like Dev/QA & UAT before anything is introduced to Production, makes life easier and much more manageable. So yes, pressure is real, fear is real, but so is teamwork, friendship, and a good laugh. It may seem out of place, but it lightens the mood. In these situations, mood is everything, at least that is how I feel. Pressure comes and goes, fear subsides, and rational thought and years of training kick in like muscle memory.