ght process or config- uration process can be discovered before they are made. Usually, it only takes a couple of instances of someone else finding your mistakes before you learn to be more careful. The biggest advantage of change control is that it can help you look good. If you make some change on the fly, and it causes hours or days of downtime and possibly lost revenue, what do you suppose the upper echelon of your company will think Chapter 41: Avoiding Frustration of you? Do you think you'll be the first on their list for promotion or a raise? Prob- ably not. Now, think how management will view you if you have a reputation for always following change-control procedures, always presenting well-documented change- control requests, and always performing successful change controls. Change control is about protecting the company's interests. Like it or not, the company's interests are more important to the company than your disinclination to follow change-control processes. The long and short of all this is that you should learn to love change control. If you accept it as a learning experience and under- stand that all successful large-scale businesses employ some version of change control, you'll be happier in the long run. How Not to Be a Computer Jerk The computer industry is known for attracting a certain type of individual: the arche- typal "computerguy" who thinks he's smarter than everyone around him and talks to people like they're idiots because they don't know what the fuser does in a laser printer. To be fair, most people in the industry are not like this-and not all of the ones who are this way are guys! What is it that makes these people the way they are, and why are they attracted to the computer industry? While I don't have any studies to back me up, I have made some observations over the years, both of myself and of others. Yes, I'll admit I was one of these annoying people in a past life, and I'll share with you how I recovered to become a successful professional. There are a couple of things th