Shadowing Practice: How I Escaped Help Desk Fast (Step-by-Step) - Learn English Speaking with Video

Ladies and gentlemen, in this video,

I'm going to discuss how I escaped help desk fast.

Now, first, I need to start with the fact that help desk is not a career.

I know that some people are going to get angry about that.

Not that it can't be a career,

but in my opinion, it's meant to be like an entryway.

It's meant to be a launch pad.

And if you treat it like anything else,

which I've seen a lot of people do, you will get stuck.

I was in help desk for a small four months before I escaped and became a system administrator.

In this video, I'm going to explain to you how I did it exactly step by step

so that you can do the same thing.

Okay, so first, before I was in IT,

I was a teacher in Texas.

I taught Spanish and I was also a coach and I was making about $70,000,

which in teacher standards is pretty good.

But I just kind of got fed up.

I had huge classes.

I had like a lack of purpose.

I didn't really have a real growth trajectory.

I loved tech.

I loved computers.

And I looked at IT and I thought this is where the future is.

And this is where I want to be so I can find purpose,

grow my career, make more money,

make more responsibility, or rather have more responsibility.

And just this is where I need to be.

And so my last year as a teacher,

I spent eight months, took all of my like 20 days off that I had and I studied for three certs,

the A+, the Network+, and the Security+, all by CompTIA.

And by the time my teaching contract was up,

I had already lined up an IT job,

an entry-level job at an MSP.

And I applied for jobs for a total of about two months.

I think I had 32 tailored applications

and that's relatively low in the space in terms of what I've seen other people have to do.

Now, again, my first role was at an MSP,

which is a managed service provider.

So we gave IT services to other companies,

specifically banks and credit unions.

And it was a tier one position.

It was technically called tier one special services engineer,

which sounds cool, but I wasn't really engineering anything.

I was like pinging down devices.

I was doing a lot of phishing email analysis,

which was actually pretty fun.

VPN, end user DNS stuff, troubleshooting hardware, software.

It was normal tier one stuff.

I was fortunate that I got to work remote basically from day one.

But to be honest, I really hated being in the call queue.

I was taking back-to-back calls and I just hated it.

I wanted to get out of the call queue as quickly as I possibly could.

And please note, I made a ton of mistakes at tier one as well.

Like early on, I thought that I had to be this person

that knew everything and I would almost act like I knew everything,

but I really didn't.

And I was making tons of mistakes.

I wasn't asking the right questions because I didn't know what to ask,

but I picked up quickly that it's best to just accept that you don't know information,

ask as many questions as you can about it,

be honest about that to the end user and then go do your research and come back to them.

This is one of my first big lessons.

Now, why I think most people get stuck,

and this is what I saw in a lot of my coworkers,

is that a lot of them just stopped they just got the position

and they stopped learning they stopped studying they stopped trying really hard they stopped getting certs

and honestly i think a lot of it was fear they

were scared of moving up they were scared of failing they were scared of not being ready

and people just have this tendency to just kind of sit back

and like take their foot off the gas and just get comfortable

and comfortable just turns into getting stuck

and to be honest with you i went into tier one with a a completely different mentality.

I knew that I wanted to get out as soon as humanly possible.

I was making like $48,000.

I had bills to pay.

I had goals that I had to reach.

Again, my plan was just to move up as quickly as possible.

I wanted to at least match my teacher's salary of $70,000.

And here's exactly what I did.

First, I outworked everyone.

I took more tickets than anyone else on tier one.

I closed more tickets than anyone else on tier one.

I also billed more hours than anyone else on tier one.

This is not me bragging.

This is just me telling you what it takes to make your move out of tier one to be inevitable.

When you're new and you don't have like years of experience that you can bank on,

the only thing that you can actually control is your effort.

And so you have to max this out.

I wanted my name to be at the top of every single report,

leaderboard, metric, anything that my bosses or my boss's bosses were seeing.

And to be honest with you,

it worked and people noticed.

Like people called it out in meetings.

And I remember the tier three manager calling it out to me and I felt all giddy and good inside.

Next, I got my CCNA in four months.

While I was grinding tickets during the day,

I was studying at night.

It was like an hour a day.

Sometimes it was two hours.

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Sometimes it was three if you would count flashcards.

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My wife and I would go shopping.

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I recall one time being in HomeGoods and just studying Anki cards the entire time.

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I already had a small home lab set up and I also had Cisco Packet Tracer.

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So I was doing a lot of practicing with labs.

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Nobody else on tier one that I knew of even had their CCNA.

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Now this made me stand out above everyone else.

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And if there's one cert that moves the needle at that early stage,

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I really think that it's CCNA.

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This was a big separator.

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Next, I helped everyone that I possibly could.

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I offered to mentor the new incoming tier ones.

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This was when I had like one or two months of experience.

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I offered to help the tier twos.

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I begged to help the tier three system engineers.

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Now, over time, I became known as the guy that helps everyone.

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And I think that that reputation is powerful.

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When a promotion comes up and leadership is kind of deciding between like five people,

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I feel like they're going to choose the guy who helps everyone.

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That's the person that's going to get the shot.

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Now on top of this,

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and this is huge, I also volunteered for the hard stuff.

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When there was a problem that nobody touched,

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I always raised my hand.

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Was I qualified?

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Absolutely not.

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Was I scared?

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Usually, but I always just dove in and did it.

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And to be honest, I think that mindset really helped me a lot as well.

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Like you're never going to be ready.

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You're never going to feel like you're ready.

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And this goes for anything in life.

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Like if you wait until you feel ready for that next thing,

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you're never actually going to feel ready and you're never actually going to move forward.

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The key is to just expand your domain as much as humanly possible

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and then catch up and then keep that process going,

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expand and catch up.

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So you take the hard ticket,

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you learn it on the fly and you figure it out and you become better on the other side.

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Now, four months in a system administrator,

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a tier two system administrator position opened up internally.

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And I applied and I walked into that interview extremely confident,

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even though I knew at the time I was not ready for the job.

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Again, technically I was not even close to ready,

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but to be honest, again, you never are.

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I was confident I had put in the work.

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I took the CCNA.

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I could learn anything.

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I had the reputation that I help anyone and I was ready to just walk into the fire.

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I got the promotion and in week one of being a tier two,

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they threw me into a priority one ticket that had been ongoing for like two months.

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A customer had been frustrated over a networking issue that had never been resolved.

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I took it, I was terrified.

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Like I legitimately didn't sleep good for like the couple of weeks that I was suffering on that ticket.

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But again, I just attacked it head on.

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I went into these meetings.

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I'm talking with multiple CCNP network engineers and CEO of bank and I was completely in over my head,

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but I just took everything on head on and I was as confident as I could possibly be.

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And I never looked back.

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Now my system administrator position had a base salary of I think it was $55,000

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and then it had some variable stuff on top of it.

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So you'd get paid more if you billed more

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and you could bill more by doing things like taking priority one tickets or like working after hour tickets.

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And there was a rounding system in there too.

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So if you did like five minutes of work,

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it would round up to a quarter of an hour.

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So you could kind of cheese the system a little bit.

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Realistically, if you worked super hard and took a bunch of P1s,

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you could probably make up to like $100,000.

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I think in my only actual year as a system administrator, I made $87,000.

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So I went from 48K in year one to like just about 90K in year two.

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So I was pretty happy.

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And this is like what's possible when you refuse to just be comfortable.

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Now, was I comfortable with that salary?

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I mean, when I got to that salary and I worked one year,

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honestly, I was ready to make more.

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I was ready to make 100K.

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I was ready to move on to the next position.

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And I always feel that.

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Like I always want more money, more responsibility, more purpose.

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And I want to make a big difference and build cool things.

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Now, if I had to boil it all down into three things,

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it would be the following.

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One, I just worked harder than everyone else.

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I just outworked everyone else.

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I took more tickets.

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I did build more hours.

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I just worked harder.

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That's the foundation.

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Secondly, I was fearless in the job and in the interview.

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I said yes to everything.

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Even when I was scared,

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I said yes to things.

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Even when I was uncomfortable, I said yes.

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And I put myself into some positions that really sucked,

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to be honest, that were, you know, really scary.

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But I just think that's how you learn and that's how you become better on the other side.

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And that mentality really helped me a lot to grow.

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And fear is that thing that keeps people stuck in help desk for like two,

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three years until they feel ready.

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But again, you never feel ready.

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Just don't let that happen to you.

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And then three, I got my certs.

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I had A+, network plus, security plus.

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I got CCNA when I went up to,

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you know, system administrator, I still continued getting certs.

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I started getting cloud certs like AZ-104 and SC-300,

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and I just never stopped the grind of studying either.

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So if you're stuck in help desk and you're wondering why you can't move up and you're not getting new certs,

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like at least three per year,

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then you need to take a look at that area of your life as well and just continue getting certs.

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Now, I know a lot of people don't like to hear this,

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but you don't need to stay in help desk for years before you can move up.

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I'm living proof that that is the case.

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Was it easy? no. Did it take lots of time and effort?

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Absolutely.

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Was it worth it?

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Yes, absolutely.

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Being a system administrator is legitimately a better job.

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Like, of course you get paid more money,

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but it's way more enjoyable as well.

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The help desk is an amazing learning opportunity,

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and we shouldn't forget that either.

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Like four to six months at help desk can teach you

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so much about tech if you grind and you work really hard.

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But there's also diminishing marginal returns,

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and you get to a point where you're like,

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man, I'm ready for something more.

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Now I was a system administrator for almost a year and a half.

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And as I said, a teacher in the past,

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I made a YouTube channel about tech videos,

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and I ended up getting a job out in San Francisco with a startup called InPhysical,

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where I do developer relations.

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I work with AI a lot.

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I work with some of the most cracked engineers in the industry doing secrets management,

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certificate management, privileged access management,

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and I genuinely love what I do.

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I can tell you when I got this job,

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I went into the interviews confident,

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and it was the same story.

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I was super in over my head.

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I was nowhere near where I needed to be technically.

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I'm still not.

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And I'm always trying to learn and trying to grow and trying to get better.

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I think that that's one of the reasons why I got this new job as well.

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And I think that if you take these patterns and you just apply them to legitimately every area of your life,

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you will be successful in whatever you wanna do.

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None of this happens if I get comfortable in tier one.

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So this is what I want for you guys.

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I want you to go out and apply these lessons and I guess these patterns and see what happens for your life.

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If you do it for one year,

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I promise you will see a marked increase in your ability to do things,

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in your confidence, and you're probably going to get a better job.

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I appreciate you guys for all the support.

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Be safe, be smart, make some good decisions,

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and good luck leveling up in your life,

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grinding through the fire, and getting out of help desk.

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Bye.

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