Name: Mick Pletcher
Location: Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Position: Senior System Administrator
Career Specializations:
- System Center Configuration Manager
- System Center Orchestrator
- Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
- Active Directory
- PowerShell Scripting
- Visual Basic Scripting
- Automation
Mick grew up in Louisville, KY until he was ten years old after the passing of his father. He and his mother moved to Bowling Green, KY in 1983 and lived there for 16 years. In 1999, he moved to Nashville, TN for a job opportunity at J.C. Bradford & Co, which was the start of his IT career.
Mick started out writing his first programs on a TRS-80 Model III in 1983 at the age of 10. He had always wanted to be an engineer until that point. It was love at first sight and I never looked back. Ever since that moment, computers have consumed a great deal of his life.
Mick started out writing his first programs on a TRS-80 Model III in 1983 at the age of 10. He had always wanted to be an engineer until that point. It was love at first sight and I never looked back. Ever since that moment, computers have consumed a great deal of his life.
He attended Western Kentucky University in pursuit of a computer science degree with a business concentration. The moment he took economics, he was hooked. He ended up getting his degree in economics with minors in computer science and business administration. For a while, he pursued a career in finance. Luck had it that he ended up back into computers in 1999.
As for hobbies, he has a diverse interest. They include astronomy, welding and fabrication, hunting, travel, programming, and mountaineering. Some of his past interests and hobbies were riverboarding, sportbikes, triathlon, mountain biking, and cycling.
When it comes to travel, Mick and his wife have traveled much of the planet. They like to travel because it is their philosophy that it is not what you have when you are on the death bed, it's what you have experienced.
In September 2012, I embarked on climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and summited on the 7th of that month. I have to say that it was one of the most thrilling things I have ever done. One piece of advice I give to others is to get out of your comfort zone and do something extraordinary. It will open up your horizons.
In September 2012, I embarked on climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and summited on the 7th of that month. I have to say that it was one of the most thrilling things I have ever done. One piece of advice I give to others is to get out of your comfort zone and do something extraordinary. It will open up your horizons.
I started out as a help desk tech at J.C. Bradford in 1999. From that point on, I moved to third level help desk. It was this position in which I got my first taste of scripting and automation. Most in IT know what it is like having tickets escalated to them and not knowing exactly what was done to resolve an issue. It was that very thing that prompted me to learn scripting and write automation scripts so that when a ticket was escalated, I knew exactly what had taken place. In 2005, I left that company and moved on to a management IT position. I did everything at that point. It was a one-man job. I have to say that I learned a lesson on being the only IT person. It is stressful, to say the least. Much of that position was not automated. I really got into automation big time there. By the time I was finished writing so many scripts, I had maybe an hour of work a day. At this point, I would be so bored in that position that I took up learning new skills, which lead me to build a computer build lab for system builds. It was this very thing that got me where I am today. I learned all about packaging files, creating a system build, scripting, automation, and VBScript. Soon after learning all of this, the music industry was taking enormous hits and I knew I had to leave before my job got cut, which it did 6 months later. My new job was what I do today....an SCCM administrator. The skills I had learned in the previous job of packaging and scripting lead right into software deployments as a next step. In this position, I was still scripting with VBScript but began slowly transitioning in 2011 to PowerShell. Finally, I was offered my current position also as an SCCM administrator. It has been very rewarding.
Blogs
These blogs were originally started to share information with my colleagues at the office. It was about a year after I started these which they started to get noticed and traffic began increasing. In 2012, the blogs received the 2012 Must-Read IT Blogs award from Biztech Magazine. In 2013, it received the 100 Leading IT Sites to Watch award. After the traffic increased dramatically, I changed the purpose of the blogs to concentrate on the disciplines I work in and to help others with solving issues. As you can see from my older posts, I started out scripting in VB and then switched over to PowerShell. There are some scripts here that use AutoIT. PowerShell is a scripting language that is vast, but there is a handful of things that it is not good at and other languages such as AutoIT accel in.
