I'm Learning... I'm Learning

So for the past couple months I've been taking some Cisco classes at the local community college. I figured since I'm managing this network, I might as well know some stuff about it. That way I don't have to call in a contractor every time there is a network issue. Today I was doing some checking on some of the circuits. Making sure that I some of the updates I requested are actually showing on the lines. Now a year ago at this time, I would have no idea how to do this nor have any idea that some of this stuff needed to be done. The best part was I noticed an issue. Nothing really major, you see each branch has two routes to reach us here at the main office. One of those routes wasn't letting anything come through. From the people at the branch perspective they wouldn't see a difference. The issue is though they were using the backup route and not the main one. So now if there was an issue with that path they wouldn't be able to work. So after about 2 hours of checking and troubleshooting (again a year ago I wouldn't be able to see this issue, much less be able to troubleshoot it), I concluded it had to be an issue with our network provider who we lease these lines from. I called them and explained them what I saw and they checked stuff on there end and they saw the issue was a configuration problem on their end. They updated their end and blamo (yes that's a technical term) the primary path showed working on my end and I had a great big smile on my face. Not so much that the issue was resolved but that all the stuff from those classes was actually sinking in and that I could intelligently speak with the provider and get this issue resolved, all with the people at the branch not noticing a thing.