About

My name is Erik Briggs, if you couldn’t figure that out by the name of this site. I was born in Southern California and grew up in Fullerton. I was sort of your standard schmuck, going through school as such. I just turned 28 yesterday, so that about sums up my life.

Well, okay, there is a little more to me than that.  As mentioned, I grew up in Fullerton (which is next to Anaheim, where Disneyland is) for my entire life.  I went to Cal State Fullerton for more than a year after High School, working there in the Athletic Equipment Room.  There I learned to call everyone “Boss” and I worked on my Golf game.  When I was 20, I decided to serve an LDS mission for a little over 2 years.  I spent 2 months in Utah learning Tagalog, and then the next 23 months in the Philippines.  While there, I became fluent in Tagalog (oo, talagang matatas ako) and learned many countless things I will never be able to forget.  Upon returning home to the USA, I attended Fullerton College for a semester, where I learned that I was very interested in Behavioral Science.  I felt I needed a change on scenery, so after 1 semester, I decided to move to Utah.

In January 2002, I transferred to UVSC (now known as UVSU) in Orem, Utah.  I moved in with a friend I grew up with in Fullerton, Brian “Brain” Rowland, and started taking more classes, emphasizing in Psychology.  While taking classes, I did a number of jobs, including an early morning paper route, tagalog translation, and serving at a local restaraunt.  I eventually did some freelance computer work for a company where I made enough money to help me realize there was more money for me in computers than anything else.

Around that same time, I met a tall blonde bombshell who, as my roommate found out, thought I was cute, but too short.  This is where Brian proved his worth to the world and convinced a tall blonde to go out with a short(er) guy (c’mon now, I’m a respectable 5’8″ when I stretch, and she is a smidgen under 5’10″).  It took a lot of “coaxing” on his part to get her to give me a shot.  She was even more startled when he jeapordized the whole operation when he told her two things about me: a) I had never had a girlfriend before, and b) that I had never even kissed a girl before.  Through some miraculous turn of events, she let me take her to watch me play soccer.  Good move here guys, keep in mind that any time you can show off your athletic prowess to a woman, its a good thing.  Apparently I rock at soccer, so she quickly fell for me .

If any of you think I’m still serious after that last paragraph, you don’t know me very well.  I do rock at soccer, but I was kidding about some of the other stuff.

Somewhere in there, the greatest thing happened to me:  I got myself fired from my job as a server.  Well, technically, you can’t fire a hard worker, but you can tell him to leave and pay him some money,  which is what actually happened.  I had some philosophical differences in the way the business was being run, and didn’t hide my feelings.  After a couple meetings with the boss, he said we should just part ways.  I agreed and promptly went home and slept.  It was great.  About a week later, I started Jerky Computers, a computer consulting and reselling business.  To this day, I think getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to me.  It was when I stopped letting myself be worth $2.15 an hour (Utah server wage), and started living up to my true potential.

A few months later, after dating for 9 months, I proposed to Annelise and she accepted.  6 months after that, in June 2004, we were married in the LDS Temple in Boston, MA.  We “set up shop” here in Utah and I started looking for a “real” job.  I’m not one for taking advice, but I won’t deny good advice when I hear it.  My father told me that I’d be better off finding steady income, rather than eeking out a living running my own business.  All it took was one resume and one interview.  That’s just how jobs have been for me in my life.  Within 6 weeks of getting married, I started working for a local IT company full-time, where I was an outsourced helpdesk guy for our largest client, Central Utah Clinic.  After 8 months or so, they figured out that I knew more than a Helpdesk guy needed to, so they brought me up to their office as a Network Engineer/Consultant.  There I learned a lot about running networks, and specifically, Cisco networks, with Cisco VOIP solutions.

After 2 years of that, I was growing restless, as most guys do in jobs they don’t love.  There were some aspects that I liked, and some I just detested.  I started looking for alternatives, and found out that our largest client was hiring for an in-house position.  I decided to apply and got the job.  In Feb. 2007, I became the Sr. Network Engineer for Central Utah Clinic, where I operate our Cisco Network and am in charge of our 700+ computers over 13 sites across the Wasatch Front.

Let me rewind a few months.  About 2 weeks after getting my own health insurance, and shortly after Valentine’s day , Annelise and I found out that she was pregnant.  In Nov, 2006, Samuel Erik Briggs was born as a happy baby boy.  This happened to become another contributing factor in me finally wanting to look for a better job, especially one in which didn’t require me paying my own $5000 deductible each time we decided to have a child.  As of this day (Feb, 2008), we are still paying for Samuel, and aren’t quite ready for more.  Samuel has kept us on our toes, while making sure I know what stress is.  He is probably the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life.  As if having a wife wasn’t motivation enough, Samuel is the ultimate motivator for going to work, being thrifty, and anything else a man would need motivation to do.