What Is a CCIE ?

Originally pub­lished at Techtarget when I sent it to them for fun. Reproduced here because I wrote it, and it still seems funny today. Note it is deriv­at­ive from some joke that was around at the time.

Interestingly, much of the puns on CCIE study top­ics are for­got­ten tech­no­logy as mod­ern CCIE’s no longer study Token Ring, DLSW, Appletalk and other fine technologies.

25 Oct 2001 What is a CCIE?

By Greg Ferro, CCIE

In the course of my day-​​to-​​day work, people ask me what is a CCIE™? I thought about this for some time. I wrote some notes. And this is what I came up with:

I am a dynamic fig­ure, often seen scal­ing 8 foot com­puter racks and charm­ing mag­netic secur­ity cardswipes. I have been known to remodel SME net­works on my lunch breaks, mak­ing them more effi­cient in the area of cap­ital deploy­ment, reli­ab­il­ity and per­form­ance. I trans­late tech­nobabble for Management, I write award-​​winning tech­nical present­a­tions and deliver them bet­ter than an American pres­id­ent announ­cing tax cuts.

I can recite com­plete chapters of the Cisco Documentation CD, back­wards and, with little effort and at the same time, per­form decimal to bin­ary con­ver­sion for very large numbers.

I woo women with my sen­su­ous and god­like MIDI play­ing on a note­book. I can pilot com­puter trol­leys up severe inclines with unflag­ging speed, and I can rack Cisco gear faster than Arnold Schwarznegger can bench press. I am an expert in net­work dia­gram­ming tools, a vet­eran in web surf­ing, and know the Cisco Web Site bet­ter than I know my own family.

Just to keep it inter­est­ing, I occa­sion­ally tread water for three days while pro­gram­ming Cisco prac­tice labs. I man­age time effi­ciently and can com­plete a timesheet every week. In addi­tion, I know the part num­ber for every Cisco router cable.

Using only a Chinese AC power cord and a large glass of water, I once single-​​handedly rebuilt the net­work core of major co-​​location facil­ity after the roof fell in. I used to play games, but now it’s ser­i­ous. I am the sub­ject of numer­ous urban myths and I am the cre­ator of a few as well. When I’m bored, I test fiber optic cable, cal­cu­late power loss sums on UTP and the min­imum refrac­tion index for 50 micron mul­timode fiber. I mean, what IS the point of it ?

I under­stand that DLSW and Source Route Translational Bridging actu­ally has a reason for exist­ence. It’s not just IBM play­ing a prac­tical joke. Really.

I enjoy urban guer­illa activ­it­ies. I can build a 802.11b para­bolic dish anten­nae using sur­plus anten­nae from defunct satel­lite com­pan­ies and a juice can. It has bet­ter per­form­ance than off the shelf products. I think that hav­ing a wind gen­er­ator and solar array as power backup for my prac­tice lab is not only respons­ible pre­par­a­tion, it’s envir­on­ment­ally friendly too. On Wednesdays, after work, I repair old mon­it­ors free of charge for my local charity.

I know that canon­ical to non-​​canonical con­ver­sion is not about reli­gion, it’s about “ART.“

Microsoft geeks world­wide swoon over my ori­ginal line of cor­duroy even­ing wear, which I don’t under­stand — it was sup­posed to be funny. I don’t per­spire. I am a private cit­izen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller num­ber ten and have won the cash jackpot.

I can speak IPX NLSP, AppleTalk, ATM PVC, QoS, and BGP to name a few, and redis­trib­ute routes at will, with fil­ter­ing, using non con­tigu­ous masks. I install IPV6 on cus­tomer sites whenever I can, just so I can play with it. Same for OSPF NSSA. Children trust me.

I can hurl squishy giveaway tradeshow toys at sales per­son­nel with stun­ning accur­acy, and ensure that the dweeb from admin­is­tra­tion gets the blame. I have cha­risma bey­ond nor­mal mor­tals; if I didn’t the boss would have sent the other guy to this exam.

I once read Cisco Quality of Service, Caslow Bridges and Routers 2^nd Ed, and Jeff Doyles’ Routing TCP/​IP Vol2 in one day, and still had time to do prac­tice on a Frame Relay mul­ti­point net­work, using OSPF and IGRP, split hori­zon, route maps and ISDN. I know the exact loc­a­tion of every food item in the super­mar­ket and I use a link state pro­tocol to cal­cu­late the shortest path to get there.

I have per­formed sev­eral cov­ert oper­a­tions with the CIA. It was kind of fun hav­ing them fol­low me around. I know that secur­ity and pri­vacy is a phantasm-​​like myth cre­ated by “secur­ity com­pan­ies” to extract money from IT Managers who can’t imple­ment a decent secur­ity policy. But it’s great fun to play with.

I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. I know exactly how much cof­fee my body will take to sus­tain me at peak func­tion. While on vaca­tion, I suc­cess­fully nego­ti­ated with the hotel to fix their net­work in return for free accom­mod­a­tion. The laws of soci­ety do not apply to me.

I bal­ance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On week­ends, to let off steam, I par­ti­cip­ate in full-​​contact tech stock day trad­ing. Years ago I dis­covered the mean­ing of life but for­got to write it down.

I can ori­gin­ate default routes, con­di­tion­ally, after redis­trib­ut­ing from a class­ful dis­tance vec­tor pro­tocol. I have made extraordin­ary four course meals using my Cisco 7500 lab router as a stove (after all its runs all the time anyway).

I breed prizewin­ning idioms. Fox Mulder knows my phone num­ber. I have spoken with Elvis.

I am Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert Number 6920. I do good work on Cisco equipment.

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