Tina Shakour
UC Expert, TechWiseTV
Well, I was born in Indiana, grew up in O-hi-o, spent a winter in Seattle and have been firmly entrenched in San Francisco, CA since 2002. That may explain a lot of things up front!
I graduated from THE Ohio State University with honors and a degree in Communications in Culture and Society. This pretty much qualified me to be a graduate student or work at the mall. I had always love computers and was always the geek girl who could fix your computer when it wouldn’t print. After a lovely un-paid internship at the Chamber of Commerce in DC, I realized I should be getting paid for all this “computer stuff”.
Through sheer stubbornness, I got my first job answering incoming sales calls for a computer company. I worked my way into technical support and eventually into the IT department for the Limited Brands. After awhile I moved into Worldcom/MCI/UUnet in Columbus, OH to do DNS (BIND – the real kind of DNS) and Microsoft Exchange Administration. We won’t discuss what versions those systems were. . .
The dot-com boom came and I moved to the West coast to work for F5 Networks. Then the day came when I got a recruiting call from Cisco. That was like the dream come true for a girl from Ohio who used to suffer through tech support calls.
Since my time at Cisco, I’ve always been the voice chick. I spent several years as an SE (systems engineer) in Sales, then an SE Manager. During those years I passed the Voice CCIE lab and got my number – then my brain rotted as a manager and I never passed the test in time to re-cert (so I lost my number but it was 13499).
Now I spend my time co-hosting TechWiseTV as the UC Expert and working hard to understand IP Communications industry trends throughout the globe.
I am thrilled to live in San Francisco and still get giddy driving across Golden Gate bridge. My husband is also part of the Cisco family through the Ironport acquisition – this provides us many hours of fascinating and geeky conversation.
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