How my blood turned from red to yellow

I've seen several posts this morning describing personal journeys into the wonderful world of Notes/Domino, so I though that I would throw mine in too. Of course, the first words that come to mind are that of Doctor Evil, "The details of my life are quite inconsequential... Very well, where do I begin?"
We'll begin back in late 1997 after I was "downsized" and struggling to find a new job. After trying my hand at a failing start-up, I ended up at a local utility company on the Help Desk and by chance, they were a Lotus Notes shop. Never having seen Lotus Notes prior to this in my career, I was of course on the "Lotus Notes sucks" bandwagon. But that quickly changed. In time, I grew to love the program for some odd reason. But I'm glad I did because when I was ready to move on from that company to my current company, having that knowledge of Notes was a HUGE plus and likely got my foot in the door. The company, (which of course will remain nameless due to an agreement with my director, yet anyone who know me knows where I work, so we'll leave it at that), was just starting to build a help desk staffed with full-time employees instead of contractors. The director at the time was neighbors with the director at the utility company and the utility director gave me even positive marks to get me in the door. I did and since April of 1999 have been entrenched there.
I started as the "Notes" person on the Help Desk and after a couple of years broke into the server group, but I wasn't going to do Notes which bummed me out. I was instead in charge of the corporate backups and on the OS/2 to NT migration team. One thing I made sure of was that I never allowed myself to get out of doing something related to Notes/Domino. That sometimes got me in trouble, but I usually got myself out of it too. Luckily, it was only about a year later that the door opened for me to be the Domino admin for the company and since then I haven't looked back.
I, like many of you reading this, love being a part of the Domino community. We are an odd bread of folks. I've always noticed that when it comes to Domino, you either "get it" or you don't. You either understand that what you are managing is a living breathing beast. If you treat it well it will treat you well. If you ignore it, it can get out of hand too quickly and you have a mess on your hands. So that's my story and hopefully there are many more chapters to come.