My early Beatport email signature called me the Network Administrator.
The title appears under a forwarded message on Thanksgiving. It is less senior than the “senior systems administrator” title on later resumes, and both descriptions may have been used inside a small company where the work did not fit neatly into one box. The signature is useful because it shows how I presented the role at the time.
Network administration meant much more than switches and cables. I was already working on the mail host, IMAP access, message queues, external delivery, shared addresses, mailing lists, and vacation responders. Storage and server hardware were also part of the job. Two days after the Beatport offer, I had sent links for hard drives the company needed.
The holiday timing mattered because the store did not close. Beatport sold downloads to DJs in multiple countries and time zones. Customers could search and buy while the Denver office was empty. Labels and content teams could send material while another part of the company was away.
The inbox shows one employee's vacation notice saying she would return after the holiday and asking people to resend messages when she got back. That was a human workaround around the limits of the system. It also explains why I cared about automatic replies and dependable delivery. A missed message could remain invisible until somebody noticed that expected work had not arrived.
I was still early in the job and still proving what I could take on. The signature did not say director, architect, or executive. It named the foundation: the network and the systems connected to it.
Those foundations were going to grow quickly. By early 2007 my title would change, and by 2009 the environment would be dramatically larger. On this Thanksgiving, the role was simpler to describe.
I was Beatport's network administrator. The store was open, the mail was moving, and the infrastructure was becoming my responsibility one service at a time.