I work in a pretty small department. There are 17 of us, mostly warehouse workers and managers. But I'm not really so much warehouse- my immediate manager is the in charge of logistics systems like the online FedEx shipping program (which is our own, not FedEx.com) and all of our databases. He has a systems admin and me working under him. Since he's a casual 20 hour per week employee, he does what he can but relies pretty heavily on the other girl to maintain the databases and fix things when they break, and me to field phone calls from the people who use FedEx and the databases.

In two weeks our systems admin is moving to a new job. In two weeks, our systems manager is getting married and going on vacation for three weeks. In two weeks, I'm going to be completely and utterly screwed if something goes wrong that can't be fixed by me simply restarting a server. Our manager's manager sat us all down today and said that they're not going to replace the systems admin because he knows that 1)I'm always up for new things, 2)I can learn this stuff, and 3)it's better in the long run and makes me more valuable in the midst of our two-year long layoff fest if I can double as a programmer.

So my questions are: I'm already going to take the company's online courses for Access and will see if they have anything for beginning SQL, but where else can I learn Access and SQL from the very beginning? I need dummy classes to start off with. PowerPoint too, but I think I'll pick up on that pretty quickly since I have an intermediate level knowledge of it already. Where do programmers start out? I always figured they learned the basics from their geek friends before graduating high school and taking real classes in college. My geek friends were comic book collectors, not programmers. And the one programmer I was friends with was also a hacker and didn't want to corrupt my fragile little mind.

My degree is in makeup design, not computer science! Actually that cracked the manager up. He had no idea. I'm usually the go to girl for simple fixes when the techies are out, but now I need to know a lot more than "oh, just delete your cookies, close the browser, and try again".