I'm a volunteer. I got hooked in my first relational database class in college. The magic of pulling information out of a big pile of data turned me on and I've never looked back.

I view my primary function as protecting the data for my clients. Backups, restores, emergency preparedness, and disaster recovery are my top priorities each day. After I am satisfied that all is well in that world, I move on to performance tuning, helping others with queries, etc.

The "icy water" you mention was when I started my first job as a solo DBA after the previous DBA had quit. Everything looked wrong to me regarding datatypes, backup strategies, naming conventions, storing calculated values, and many other issues. For instance, the database backups were a mile wide but only an inch deep. Because I was new at the organization, I studied long and hard before I had the confidence to suggest and implement changes. It was a tough time, but in the end it was very satsifying to bring all the professionalism that I could to the job of DBA.

HTH

Elliott