Doing Beautiful Work Inside an Ugly Frame

Most technology support is transactional. A problem arrives, a fix is applied, a ticket is closed. The person on the other end is a “user.” The interaction is measured by how fast it ends.

This newsletter is about a different way.

For thirty years, I’ve worked in technology support in higher education. Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of my work as fixing computers and started thinking of it as restoring people’s confidence in the presence of technology that intimidates them. I never called them “users.” I never made them feel dumb for not knowing. I built a practice around the belief that the human being matters more than the technology.

These essays explore what that practice looks like from the inside. The methodology behind it. The philosophy underneath it. The moments that made it worth the fight. And the institutional friction that made it a fight in the first place.

Each essay is short, self-contained, and written to be read by anyone who has ever held specialized knowledge over someone who needed their help. If you work in IT, you’ll recognize yourself. If you don’t, you’ll recognize someone you’ve sat across from.

New essays publish three times a week.

Subscribe if you believe there’s a better way to help people with technology. Or if you’ve been doing it that way all along and never had the words for it.