So I graduated in 2003, at the depth point of the dot com bubble crash recession as a Network Engineer.
Jobs were spead thin, so when I got a call 4 months later to do some basic IT stuff, that sounded great.

It was a technical support firm for a large European bank. You called in at 8am and they'd tell you where to go.
As I only had the basic internal training, I was only allowed to do printers and workstations.
So most of the days there wasn't anything early in the morning and I had to call back half an hour later, and another half an hour...
Also frequently occuring the last intervention was around 3pm.
During the day you could do some shopping in between interventions which was great, as we're talking about the holidays season.

Of course, beginning of january, there wasn't much shopping left to do and replacing toners and monitors wasn't really a brainteaser, so I decided to apply internally for an open application.
I aced the technical test, best of all applicants and it was located at a single site, close to my home.
But the jobs was given to someone else, with longer experience inside the company.

A few months later, another position opened in one of the main sites of the bank, where we were allowed to do some actual troubleshooting on the machines.
It still was end-user stuff, but it was a great improvement and the team was wonderfull.

About four months later, a new batch of cattle was hired in the firm, so there had to be some moving around, and as I was the highest educated in the building, I got tranfsterred to a "software testing team", actually the highest position in existance in the company (except for a phone support team for the field technicians).

What had to be cutting-edge research turned out to be boring, repetitive pseudo code writing in Excel before being executed with a trial version of a major automation program.
It was actually a jumping board to leave the company. Two of my colleagues left before me, two left right after me.
There was time enough to study, surf, play, do anything you want, except work .

I took the chance of changing to the bank itself, in stead of working for the technical subsidiary.
The job interview promised a nice time, a lot of interesting technical problems.

Sadly, none of these hypothetical problems turned out to be ours to handle. We didn't do hardware, nor OS.
It's a big company, so there was no networking (seperate team), as with storage and any other major hardware part.

We did second line support, but as first line was filled with a bunch of nitwits, we did most of the supporting, they made calls in the management system, without noting any necessary information.
It was a broadband support job, end users, back-end applications and some shit called "IBM WebSphere".

Then there were a lot of reorganisations, support teams were split, moved, renamed, changed...
We ended up with the back-end applications and the WebSphere.

The backend applications were nice, but bound to a massive amount of documentation, burocracy and "I didn't do that". The WebSphere still sucked.
Life slowly moved on, without any change even after some clear signs to the supervisors.

After working there for 3 years in total (all previous functions combined) I decided I was done there and had to go look elsewhere if I ever wanted to see a cisco router again.

I applied at a very small company and was promised great technical independance, high-end configurations and total system implementation control in my task as field engineer.
What wasn't included in the jobdescription, is "total system implementation control" is only applicable if I happen to think the same as the CEO. "High end" is read only for me and "independance" means I can do everything I'm told to, on my own.

Turns out most of the customers actually get first line support from us. We mostly get questions about printers and word documents.
We've got our customer A, part of a large international group, we do their PC's there and we get to manage some local servers, within the lines drawn by the group.
Customer B is getting their first server soon and has a lot of end-users.
Customer C calls us to assist in the most repetitive jobs on the planet. Phone support like scripts to follow to deploy some local application on 500 workstations.
Customer D has some nice infrastructure, configured by a third company, we get to do, computers yes indeed, and there a Dutch jackass who asked me last week to fix something he had been fucking up for weeks while he could go get credit by finishing of something I had worked on for several days.
And the list goes on.

There are slow periods, allowing me to do research for several days a week. Sadly, I think I've researched everything I could think of.
And there are days everyong thinks their personally created problem is the end of the world. Some people just shouldn't be allowed to touch computers.

So, I'm wondering, what should I actually do to see some networking?