One Challenge After Another
John D Bertucci
My whole life, my whole life has been one challenge after another.
A challenge in high school to make straight As. Challenges living with a woman who was sick every day for 18 years. The challenges of learning one career after another, starting over, not once, not twice, but four times. The challenge of living with four different women. The challenge of learning different trades. The challenge of saving money when things seem hopeless. The challenge of losing nine jobs and starting over. Nine people quit on me.
But the fact is there's one thread through all of it. My faith. And my refusal to give up.
People ask, how did I reinvent myself? I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. I wasn't thinking about reinvention. I was thinking about survival.
The Certifications
An MCP, MCSE, MCSA. In 2008, I had to pass nine Microsoft IT exams in nine weeks. I passed them all and didn't miss a single question. This was after mastering a server lab book for six months at home, on a laptop with a five-megabit internet connection. That was Windows Server 2003. When I started, it took me two weeks to complete all the labs. By the time I finished mastering the book, it took me two hours.
Every few months the school had a boot camp in Anaheim. It was after six months that I signed up. Then came the nine exams and certificates. All of that was required before I arrived at the three-week IT boot camp in California. They wanted to charge me 10 grand, but I settled for six for a boot camp and six
months of training. I asked for another boot camp. A Cisco CCNA boot camp and I got it for free.
I was 48 years old with eight other men. They were half my age. It was a grind. Ten hours a day of hands-on training in a huge house with six bedrooms and a server lab in the den. The final exam was eight hours straight. We got in the lab at 7 a.m. and walked out at 4 p.m.
I got the networking certificate from Lan Wan Professionals.
The IT Work Begins I spent the first two years after training working part-time and temporary jobs for IT recruiters. This included banks, businesses and companies that needed temporary help. A big project was replacing Windows Server 2000 computer hardware, installing switches, a new router and a new server in the old Whitney Banks. With each project I was able to gain experience and more importantly, build my résumé. I finally took a full-time job working remote desktop support for eight months in Hammond, Louisiana.
In 2010, I received a call from a recruiter in Houston for a job at the BP Command Center in Mobile, Alabama. It was IT support, 72 hours a week and thirteen days straight. After three months, and a capped oil drill, that job became the springboard for a support tech job at a BP center in lower Plaquemines Parish. This was a rural location on river road in the largest community of creoles in America. They were all fishermen or shrimpers whose businesses were hurt by the oil spill.
The resume looked better after working one year in a trailer for a BP contractor, but that too ended. I found myself at Harrah’s Casino for the next four years, working alone full-time on swing shift, in the largest casino in the south.
The Cage Four years at Harrah's. A year and a half at L'Auberge. Seven years at Hollywood Casino, the Queen by the time they renamed it. Thirteen years in all, and I mastered the work in the first year at Harrah's
The cage was the job nobody wanted.
Two cages. Seven positions in one, four in the other. Eleven machines in all, and every one of them was a rat's nest.
Each cage PC had nine devices hanging off it. A monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. A swipe for the license plate, and a separate magnetic swipe for the driver's license. A card reader, a credit card machine, and an Ingenico terminal, the same kind you see in Walmarts and grocery stores. And a receipt printer.
All of them ran off USB except the monitor. A typical little computer did not have enough USB ports for all of that, so everything ran through smart hubs, and each device had to be assigned a port.
That was the part that made it complicated. A keyboard and a mouse did not care what port they were on. An Ingenico did. So did the license swipe. Those were the two devices that always failed.
When one of them failed, the port would get unassigned. You had to plug the device back in and reboot the PC, or go into Windows and assign the port yourself, and then match that port in the software. We had three different cashier software packages over the years, and they all worked the same way.
We would get a ticket. The printer is not working. The keyboard stopped. The license swipe is dead. The Ingenico is not working.
I had to learn how to fix all of those devices.
Brett was the boss over that crew. He was five foot seven, passive, very quiet. His wife wore the pants. She was very strong, and she worked in facilities, and we used to make fun of him for it.
The black guys who worked for him would tell him they would take care of it, and then they never did it. They never said no. They just never did it.
He would come look. Somebody has got to go in that cage. I know you guys do not want to do it. He would look at everybody, and then he would look at me.
I would not say a word, because I did not want to do it either.
Then I thought, you know what? The only way you are going to learn, and the only way you are going to prove yourself, is if you do the shit work.
This was the shit work. This would be like someone telling you, I do not want you to mop the floor with a mop. I want you to get on your hands and knees and mop the floor with a brush. That is what the job was like.
The counter was Formica, four feet wide and four feet off the ground. Underneath it were cabinets with doors that closed, and the computer sat on a bottom shelf six inches off the floor. You had to open those doors and get down on your hands and knees on a rubber mat to get at it. I was fifty-two years old.
The first thing I did was move the computer up to the middle shelf. That way I did not have to get on my hands and knees. I could bend over to troubleshoot it.
The dust was the worst of it. There were two centimeters of dust on each machine. I asked the man who came from the state where all that dust was coming from.
Every time they count the bills in the money machines, the machines flip through dollars really fast, and the dust flies. A cloud of it.
Here is the thing Brett never knew. I was highly allergic to dust.
It made me sick. If I did one machine, the next day I would call in sick. Brett, I am sorry, my allergies are acting up.
Finally I told him. The reason I hesitated to take on this project was because it was physically detrimental to my health. I did not want to use that as an excuse.
John, I understand. Try wearing a mask.
So I did. The paper mask helped. Before COVID, I was wearing a mask just to do my job.
The first time I did one, it was not even a PC replacement. It was just a cleanup. I pulled the machine out, brought it into the shop, blew all the dust out of it, opened it up, blew all the dust out, cleaned it up, spray cleaned it, the fan, everything. Some of the motherboards were covered in dust.
These were Dell half-towers, the top of the line at the time. We did not use full towers. I brought the machine back, put on a mask, and wiped down all the dust. I used a can of Pledge to get rid of all the dust on the shelves. There were two shelves about three feet wide under each cashier.
Then I took all the wiring out, and I Velcroed it together. I did not cable tie it, because a cable tie was just more hard work, so I used Velcro all the way down.
She wanted it color coded, so I color coded every one of them with electrical tape. If you had to go pull out a mouse, you saw the red tape around the wire by the mouse, and you saw the red tape at the end by the USB connector.
I built the wire harness from every device. Then I wrote down the assigned ports for each device, because that was assigned in the software. Then I put the whole thing back up through the countertop. There was a two-inch hole, and every wire went through the top, neatly presented up top.
I took pictures of it and showed it to my boss and the director. Is this acceptable?
John. That is perfect.
I did it seven times.
By then I was burnt and exhausted. I talked to Richard Hatfield, a young fella, twenty-five years old, and I told him I needed help. Richard, you have got to help me, man. It is killing me. I cannot do this eleven times. Can you do the other four? I will go behind you and make sure it is done the way I did the others. Please just try to do it the same way. I am meticulous. I apologize for that, but I am a guy who likes to do the same thing and do it right, each and every time.
He did. I only had to correct him maybe a little bit.
It took weeks. When I was finished with all seven of mine, I was just burnt and exhausted.
I never got an accommodation for it, or a bonus. Brett thanked me when it was over.
That was the job. Nobody else wanted to go in that cage. I went in, on my hands and knees, allergic to the dust, and I made it right, seven times, and then I made sure the other four were right too.
That is how you prove yourself. You do the shit work, and you do it right, each and every time.
The Writing Life
An independent writer, I've been at it for two years. I've got 14 books, six of them published. I got my own website. I've got 35,000 followers on America's Picks and Videos, 2000 on X and 2000 on TikTok. I've got 3 million views on my promos. 175 book promos. Two audio books. And six paperbacks and e-books.
Two years no vacation. And no two days in a row off. Never.
I did raise $900 a year ago on a GoFundMe. You know how many strangers contributed? None. I asked Chuck, hey man can you go buy a book from my website and an audio book and he did. So my Payhip site actually sold something last night.
I don't want them to swallow my pride. It seems hard for me to ask people to do something for me. I don't even know how to go about it.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a writer? And having no one read your writing? Well then you have to ask the question: Is my writing worthy? I gotta write something that strikes a nerve. Well, that story is my memoir. My Favorite Life. One man's stubbornness to succeed in everything.
But I think we live in a society that's apathetic. I do care. In fact, I care too much about everything. I care about plants and animals and children and women and men. I care about spreading the word and people's souls. I care about my writing.
I care so much about everything. And when you have that kind of passion the hurt cuts deeper. Because God honors it.
No Easy Road
Remember Project Greenlight? Ben Affleck tried to start an independent directors' Project Greenlight. That was an attempt to help those who couldn't crack the system. It didn't fly.
But now I see the same problems with writers. We need a Project Greenlight. We need an organization to help writers. There's nothing to help independent writers. Nothing. What if we could create an organization that spotlights one writer a week or one writer a day? But does it in such a big way, not just an opinion. But something bigger.
So I did a web call. And a guy was trying to say he was doing this. He had actors that would read your scripts. They would sign contracts with you for your story ideas and your book ideas. But what I saw was the people in this webinar were unpublished, asking questions, and had never written a single word. And he was trying to get out of them several hundred dollars like $800 each. It sounded good. It almost sounded too good to be true. But I sat through the whole two hours listening.
And in the end I thought the same thing I thought when I went to a real estate seminar where this guy was selling a book on how to make money buying property and reselling it. And we flipped through his book, and there was not much there. He was selling it for $1,200. And then I realized. This guy didn't get rich through real estate. He got rich through these workshops. And selling these books.
There's no easy road to success in this life. Not unless you're born into it. Howard Hughes had a dad who owned a tool company. Donald Trump had a real estate and contracting business his dad started.
No, I never really had much help. My mom and dad helped me a little bit. My mama said there's nothing you can't do alone if you put your mind to it and if you don't succeed it's because you gave up.
Those words are backed up by Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” It’s how I manage one challenge after another.
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