Back when I was a little shaver in fourth grade, I got pushed around and beat up by a few boys in my class, and I didn’t fight back. It’s a long story as to the why, but to this day I still chalk that up to being a failure. I’ve replayed so many times the image has gone soft, but I still remember the names — Sean, Matt, and Damian. The colors of their t-shirts are faded, their young faces blurred, and the emotional impact has worn thin from decades of life. I couldn’t tell you anymore whether the details are accurate or whether I’ve edited them so many times in my mind’s editing bay that what remains is more mythology than memory.

The VHS tape is wearing thin on that one. But I still have it.

The post-COVID era failures are a different story. Those are 4K. Crisp, high-contrast, every word preserved in full resolution. The moment someone above my paygrade challenges my expertise in front of colleagues in an in-person staff meeting. The email from a client on the rampage about an issue with their Canvas course while CC’ing all my supervisors that hit me like an unexpected snowball. The trolling comment an IT peer made in a Microsoft Teams channel. It catches you off-guard, it creates a blitzkrieg of confusion in my mind as to why they launched that salvo. And it leaves streaks of low-level shame streaming down my face.

Nobody notices, of course. That’s the other thing.

I’ll tell you what the replay of those moments feel like. There’s dread in it, the reluctant awareness that I’m about to put myself through something again that I’ve already survived once. There’s cringe, the specific, wincing discomfort of reliving a moment where I didn’t say the appropriate thing, didn’t establish the boundary, didn’t counter the dismissive remark with a perfectly calibrated response that eventually arrived two hours later when I was in the car or sitting slouched at the dinner table chomping on my salad. There’s frustration, directed entirely inward, expressed externally as furrowed brows that make me look angry at something or someone in the room. I’m not angry at anything except myself. I’m in a courtroom in my own mind, arguing a case that already closed, handing myself a verdict I can’t appeal.

Picture a basketball. Now picture me in a swimming pool forcing it underwater with both hands. See in your mind the effort required to keep it submerged. It’s enormous and exhausting and invisible to anyone standing at the edge.

I grew up in the ‘80s, where conflict between boys on the playground had options that aren’t available in a professional setting in 2026. Despite my exterior (I am a large man, shaved head with goatee, the kind of person who automatically gets placed in the threatening box in certain kinds of rooms), I am always, always fighting (not literally) to maintain a reputation worthy of respect. Which is double-hard when your position on the org chart carries no authority over anyone. No direct reports. No title that commands deference. Just the work, and the reputation the work builds, and a hope that the work is enough.

It isn’t always enough for everyone.

There are people in every workplace who use hierarchical status as a paintball gun. The shots aren’t lethal. They don’t end careers or break bones. But they hurt when they land, they leave a mark, and they take a while for the bruise to fade. And the person firing those shots knows exactly what they’re doing. They can’t come at me physically. So they engage with the hubris and self-importance that comes with a job title higher than mine, in public settings where a response would cost me more than silence.

They see a thin-lipped horizontal smile. Narrowed eyes. A brief, loaded silence while my mind runs scenarios of responses and outcomes in rapid-fire fashion. The mature high road of a dignified response of tacit Teflon. Or I let my hurt emotions let my mouth get the better of me and start wrestling a pig in the pen.

The pig enjoys it. I know this. I begrudgingly choose the Teflon.

The button is pressed, and the videotape starts recording.

When someone safe asks me about the impact of negative treatment, I look at them with a fairly straight deadpan face and say quietly: “I’m like a Chiquita banana. I bruise easily.” It’s the tragic comic attempting to provide humor while cautiously creating the possibility that I’m actually getting hurt. Which I am. The imposing exterior is not impact-resistant. It just looks that way from the outside.

Here is what I’ve learned to do instead of playing the tape over and over until it wears thin.

I pause a moment and look directly at the person. I say calmly: “Before I respond, I want to be clear about what you just said. My inner narrative is telling me that you...” and I name it, plainly, without accusation, without theater. Then I drop my voice slightly, and ask slowly: “Was that your intention?”

That question does more work than any comeback I’ve ever constructed on the VHS tape. It separates what was said from what was meant. It puts the basketball back in the other person’s hands without launching it out of the pool. It forces a moment of honest accounting for both of us. Before I say the appropriate thing, establish the boundary, or state a perspective to “manage up.” And I eject the VHS tape and put it back on the shelf.

I didn’t learn this in professional development training at work. I learned it in my marriage. In the unglamorous, humbling, necessary work of learning how to stay in relationship with the woman who means the most to me in the world, the person I chose. The communication skills I built at home to prevent ruptures in the most important relationship in my life turned out to be exactly the skills the professional setting needed and never thought to teach.

I brought them to work the way I bring everything to work: quietly, without announcing it, as a gift nobody asked for and nobody knew they were receiving.

I won’t pretend the “Was that your intention” subroutine has patched all the bugs in my SelfOS. The VHS tape still records sometimes. But I’ve learned not to make vows, because vows set things in motion that I don’t want to contend with. What I do instead is get to a place, after sitting through enough replays, where my inner narrative says: when the warning signs for this occur again, you will take this route. A subroutine, not a promise. A patch, not a pledge.

Interestingly, the gym helps with my SelfOS. Blaring loud music in my earbuds comprised of double-kick drums, chugging electric guitars, and shrieking vocals demanding full attention. Some may think that would be an audio paintball, but it gives my brain permission to stop processing what the silence and solitude of working remotely from home couldn’t interrupt. It takes a sonic blast to quit the review loop that quiet couldn’t. The same person who needs soft acoustic guitar albums on Saturday morning needs something completely opposite to forcibly reboot the system after a bad Wednesday. Both are medicine. Opposite prescriptions for opposite conditions.

If you recognize this videotape, you’re not broken. You’re someone who cares enough about the work, the relationships, and the standard to keep reviewing the footage. The cost of that caring is real. It lands on you in private, in places nobody thinks to check, and it fades away eventually without much fanfare.

My bruise from the professional paintball eventually fades. My subroutines get smarter. And somewhere in the gap between the paintball going thwack and the videotape finally switching to a static screen, I become more of the person I’m trying to be.

More later...

There are two versions of the living room in my house.

The first is a quiet Saturday morning. Matcha latte to my side, warm and unhurried. A big leafy tree in the front lawn greeting the weekend sunshine through the window. The Windham Hill Guitar Sampler from 1988 playing from a modded 1TB iPod Classic through a TwelveSouth AirFly into a Soundcore Boom bluetooth speaker. Music I have been listening to since I was a teenager expanding my music world by checking out all sorts of records from the town library, so deeply familiar after thirty-plus years that it stopped being just music and became atmosphere. It doesn’t ask anything of me. It simply holds an airy space with pleasant fingerstyle acoustic instrumentals to occupy the silent space.

The second is a contemplative Sunday evening. Berry-flavored seltzer this time. The street outside is darkened, a few cars parked along the curb, the weekend drawing quietly to a close. Paul Desmond’s Glad to be Unhappy is playing on the iPod, cool and unhurried. In my mind I am not in a ground-floor front room in a residential neighborhood. I am in a swanky penthouse apartment with a view of the city at night, surveying the week ahead from a luxurious elevation. The music isn’t background in this scene. It’s a thinking partner. What went well. What’s coming. What needs my attention before Monday arrives.

Same room. Same sofa. Same iPod. Completely different work.

I call this Monastic Technology. I used to call it minimalist technology, but that word got too popular in society somewhere around 2014 and I stopped using it. Monastic is the right word, and I earned it. In the summer of 2024 I spent time at a Benedictine monastery in Canada on a silence and solitude retreat. Something about that experience, the deliberate stripping away of noise, the practice of focusing on being present, the discovery that a quieter life is not a grotesque one, crystallized a philosophy I had been living in fragmented pieces for years. Personal devices stripped of distractions. Dedicated, deliberate use when I choose to use it. Very few notifications. Nothing running in the background demanding attention I didn’t offer.

The iPhone sitting across the room on the kitchen counter is the most visible evidence of the philosophy in practice. It handles calls, texts, podcasts, maps, a password manager, an authenticator, and personal email. No social media. No work apps. No scrolling. I’ll be the first to admit I’m addicted to a phone screen — the urge to connect, to be informed, to always be learning something, to be a competent technologist in a field that never stops moving. That urge is real, constantly nagging at me, and I’m not pretending otherwise.

But here’s the thing about working in technology for thirty years: I work at the ice cream shop. Any scoop I want, any time I want it, in quantities that would make a reasonable person queasy. The information, the feeds, the articles, the updates, the notifications — I have access to all of it, all day, every day, and the result is a consistent state of bloat. The nausea from too much eventually makes you avoid the stuff when you’re not working. The stuff, in my case, being screens.

And I work from home. Fully remote.

There’s no commute. No train ride where the nervous system begins to decompress as I look out the window at the rapidly-passing scenery. No fifteen-minute drive where the work-self slowly becomes the home-self. I shut down the work computer, turn around, and the personal devices are already there, same room, same four walls, same chair. The ice cream shop isn’t closed. I just change aprons.

Which means every boundary I establish has to be deliberately constructed, because my home environment provides none. The weekend listening sessions are not a bonus feature of my technology philosophy. They are the therapeutic healing from every cognitive hit my mind absorbs during the week. Aural Hygge — the Danish concept of restorative warmth and contented presence, delivered through sound. Saturday morning Windham Hill and Sunday evening Paul Desmond aren’t just pleasant. They’re how I repair the week’s damage so I can show up whole on Monday.

The iPod is the centerpiece of the strategy, and it deserves a proper introduction. It’s a sixth-generation iPod Classic, storage expanded to 1TB, a new battery with extra-long life, a custom Rockbox operating system with no reliance on Apple, loaded with a high-quality FLAC music library built from four decades of discography-deep research. No cloud-based streaming algorithm selected these artists. Every artist in that library arrived through deliberate pursuit — a record checked out from the town library at fourteen, a syndicated space-music radio program in the ‘90s where I kept notebooks of artists to research, a used CD store in a city I visited once, a recommendation from someone whose ears I trusted.

The algorithm will never know what my Saturday morning requires. It will never know the difference between the Windham Hill Guitar Sampler as ambient comfort and Paul Desmond as a catalyst for Sunday evening reflection. It would just serve me more of what I clicked last Tuesday.

I know what my Saturday morning requires. I’ve known it for thirty years.

This is what Monastic Technology actually means in practice. It’s the careful curation of an environment where the devices serve me, on my terms, when I choose to engage them — and stay quiet the rest of the time.

The sofa in the front room is where I do some of my best thinking. Not because I’ve optimized it with productivity tools or installed the right apps or subscribed to the right service. Because I built a space where the ice cream shop is genuinely, finally, mercifully closed.

The music plays, the tree does its thing in the morning light, and Monday is still two days away.

More later...

When I was in sixth grade, I discovered I had a gift.

Spelling bees. Classroom, grade, school district. First place, three years running. Twice I made it to Seattle for the Washington State spelling bee, standing at a microphone in front of a room full of people, spelling words that look like you grabbed a handful of random Scrabble tiles.

My preparation was exhausting. Every evening my mother would drill me on words for an hour. Tens of thousands of reps to train my brain to recite each letter with focus and clarity. But my visualization method was simple and a little strange. When I practiced a difficult word, I would picture it in my mind against a specific background. Yellow. With black letters. I’m not a fan of bees, so I don’t know where the visual came from. I just know it worked.

I stuck that childhood memory somewhere in the back of my mind and didn’t think about it again for roughly thirty years.

Simon Sinek has been in my professional orbit for a long time. Start With Why was introduced to me the way the right books should be, not as new information but as recognition. He named the programming code that was already running underneath my work. He gave me language for the reason I did what I did long before I could have articulated it myself. When Sinek speaks, I listen. When Sinek publishes, I pay attention.

So when I was browsing his website one afternoon and saw a book listed under his Optimism Press webpage: bright yellow cover, black lettering, my hand moved to the purchase button before my brain finished forming the thought.

The title was Unreasonable Hospitality. The author was Will Guidara.

Something in my nervous system recognized those colors before I read a single word.

Reading this book was a different experience than other business, productivity, or personal development books.

It wasn’t a gradual awakening. It wasn’t a growing realization that accumulated over chapters. It was a neck pop. The kind where you turn your head to one side and something releases that has been tight for longer than you realized, and the sound it makes is loud enough to startle you. But afterward everything feels different.

Guidara built Eleven Madison Park into the best restaurant in the world not by having the best food, though the food was extraordinary, but by treating every guest as someone whose experience deserved unreasonable attention, unreasonable care, unreasonable investment. His staff didn’t just serve people. They noticed each person. They made those dining in a beautiful restaurant feel that the entire operation existed for them specifically, at that table, on that evening.

I read that and I said to myself: I know this place! I have been working here for thirty years.

I filled thirty-seven pages of a Leuchtturm 1917 notebook with takeaways, memorable quotes, and a-ha realizations as Guidara’s world and mine kept colliding page after every turned page. Statements about the guest that mapped perfectly onto statements about the faculty member. Principles about the dining room that applied with uncomfortable precision to the university help desk. A philosophy built in a restaurant on Madison Avenue that had somehow also been built, quietly and without a name, in a Canvas LMS administrator’s office in Bellingham, Washington.

I had been practicing Hospitalitech without knowing it had a name.

You read that right. Hospitalitech is my term for what happens when fine-dining hospitality standards are applied deliberately and without apology to technology support. It is the belief that the person on the other end of the support email deserves the same quality of attention, the same anticipation of need, the same unreasonable investment in their experience that Guidara’s team brought to every table at Eleven Madison Park.

Hospitalitech isn’t a software as a service framework. It’s not a soft skills training module. It is a philosophy that says the client sitting across from you, metaphorically or literally, is the point of the entire operation. It’s not about the trouble ticket, the managerial metric or the quarterly report. It’s about them.

Guidara gave me the zip ties to bind his work with mine. Sinek had already given me the why underneath both.

I’ve been doing something other people in IT are not doing. The evidence is in the responses I receive. The faculty member who says “I had no idea it could be this easy,” the staff colleagues who feel genuinely seen because someone took two minutes to notice their good work and tell their supervisor about it. That unique something has been working. Because it is different.

What I didn’t have, until a bright yellow book with black letters arrived from Simon Sinek’s publishing imprint, was the word for it.

I pictured words in yellow and black when I was twelve years old and won spelling bees. I recognized a book in yellow and black when I was in my late forties and found the vocabulary for thirty years of professional practice.

Some things take a while to come full circle. When they do, they make a sound like pow or bang or thwack. That’s onomatopoeia for a meaningful discovery.

More later...

I know what getting fired feels like. Twice.

The first time I was thirteen years old, cleaning boats in a boatyard. The second time I was sixteen, working the grill at a family-owned restaurant that ran like a Denny’s. Both times, the reason was the same: poor work performance, and quite frankly, I didn’t do well with bosses’ authority. Both times, I deserved it.

I was not a motivated young man. I was a kid doing the minimum, probably less than the minimum, in jobs that felt like obligations rather than opportunities. It was nice to make a little money to buy the newly-released Miami Vice II soundtrack on CD and a few basketball cards at the drugstore, but nobody handed me a philosophy to operate by. Nobody sat me down and explained what it meant to take pride in your work. I was just a teenager collecting a paycheck and doing a bad job of earning it.

The summer I turned seventeen, I went to Evergreen Boys State, a civic education program run by the American Legion since 1940. A week away from home at Eastern Washington University, the first college campus I had ever stood on. A thousand seventeen-year-old boys figuring out what they thought about the world, most of us pretending we had already figured it out.

I sat in an auditorium and listened to a man named C.G. “Coke” Roberts deliver a keynote address. He was in his late fifties or early sixties. He had the bearing of a commanding officer without the bark of one. He demonstrated authority without wielding power. He commanded the room’s attention without demanding it. In an auditorium full of teenage boys whose attention span had a short lease, mine did not drift.

He had a thesis statement. One sentence. He said it clearly and then spent the rest of his address applying it to life.

I will do what I say I will do when I say I will do it.

I was seventeen years old and something in me went quiet and still. There was honor in that sentence. Integrity in it. Words that felt larger than my seventeen-year-old life but fit the sentence perfectly. Not words that teenage boys in 1990 used without irony, but the right words for what I felt. A standard. A high jump pole raised to a height worth clearing.

I memorized it before I left the auditorium.

What I did not do, in the years that followed, was live by it particularly well. Community college arrived with a full-ride scholarship for the first two years, and I drifted through it the way young men sometimes do when the urgency has been temporarily removed. I was trying to figure myself out. My father passed away in 1995 before I graduated from university, and that kind of loss has a way of making everything feel like a blur, with no memories or impactful experiences to fondly look back on in later life. I crossed the finish line with my bachelor’s degree and got my first real job a month later. Entry-level tech support. Ten months. No performance issues this time, but I was a nervous, emotionally-confused twenty-three-year-old working alongside people who were all older than me, without a father to call when I didn’t know what to do next. I was starting my approach, but I hadn’t yet found the pole.

In 1997 I got hired at the university where I still work today. Better pay. Real responsibilities. And in 1998, the circumstances of my life arranged themselves into something that changed everything.

I bought a townhome.

At 24 years old, I had a mortgage. A car loan. Monthly bills that did not care about my emotional state or my social maturity or whether I was still figuring things out. I was a homeowner, alone, with a job that had to work because there was nothing underneath me if it didn’t.

And somewhere in the back of my memory, a sentence I had memorized in an auditorium eight years earlier came back in large, bold letters.

I will do what I say I will do when I say I will do it.

This time it wasn’t inspiration. It was about integrity, and doing things when you think no one is watching you. It’s taking the high road and exceeding the client’s expectations when it is so easy to phone it in. I would not get fired for poor work performance. I would not get fired for a poor attitude. There was too much at stake, I knew exactly what being fired felt like, and I was never going to feel that again. The high jump pole went up. Higher than it needed to go. Higher than my bosses set their expectations for me. Higher than my colleagues set for their own work ethic. I chose to raise my bar because a man I heard speak once on a summer afternoon in Cheney, Washington, had shown me what it looked like to hold yourself to a standard. I spent eight years carrying that standard around, waiting for the moment it mattered enough to use.

That moment was a mortgage at twenty-four.

Coke Roberts probably never knew his thesis statement outlived that auditorium. He almost certainly never imagined it landing in a tech support office at a university in the Pacific Northwest three decades later, quietly governing how a Canvas LMS administrator engages with faculty, responds to emails, shows up for consults, and builds a relational practice that nobody ever taught him and no certification program ever validated.

But here we are...and here I am.

I will do what I say I will do when I say I will do it. This isn’t a productivity hack. It isn’t a professional branding statement. It’s the sentence a seventeen-year-old boy memorized in a room full of strangers and carried for the rest of his life because it contained something he recognized as true before he was old enough to explain why.

The bar is still up. I clear it every morning.

More later...

The email arrived the way they always do; vague, a little anxious, and missing some details I would need to actually help.

A teacher unfamiliar with Canvas. A peer review assignment that wasn’t behaving. A reference to the online documentation that, in her words, wasn’t showing her what she needed to see. And a closing “Please help?” that told me more about her frustration level than anything else in the message.

I didn’t send her a link to the same documentation she had already read. Instead, I asked a clarifying question. Which course, and which assignment are you referring to?

She replied with the course number. Just the course number. After nine years I’ve learned not to get bent out of shape about not giving me all the information I asked for. She assumed I would know which assignment she meant, because of course I would, I know everything. I’ve received this limited specification response before. I just ran out of omniscience pills today. No big deal.

So I sent a fourth email. I thanked her for the course number, because encouraging someone to share information is always worth the two seconds it takes, and then I made her an offer:

“Instead of a long-winded, bullet-point-filled email of technical directions that might put you to sleep, how about we meet via Zoom when our schedules permit? I can share my screen, we can walk through the steps in a demo course of mine, and then apply those same steps to your course and assignment. I think we can take care of business in 20 to 30 minutes.”

Within minutes, a confirmation of a consult reservation landed in my inbox, and she sent the reply email confirming she would.

What most people don’t see in that four-email thread is that I was already working. Not on the assignment. I didn’t have enough information for that yet. I was working on her. I was reading the vagueness, her word choice, the emotional register underneath the technical question. Diagnosing the shape of the support she needed before I had looked at a single item of content in her course. Some technical issues are a four-click solution, some are a two-minute “visual receipt” screencast to take care of a more detailed request. Peer review assignments are not a quick fix. Nine years of experience with peer reviews has shown me that.

Oh, the Zoom invitation offer? It wasn’t a pivot away from email. It was the conclusion of a diagnostic process my faculty client didn’t know was happening.

When she arrived in the video meeting the next day, I welcomed her and shared my screen. And without saying a single word, I let her see my Canvas dashboard.

Specifically, she saw Coach Beard’s Demo Course.

For the uninitiated: Coach Beard is a character from the television series Ted Lasso, and his face (stoic, bearded, magnificently unimpressed) greets every faculty member who joins my Zoom consults. The students enrolled in Coach Beard’s Demo Course are not pursuing degrees at my institution. Roy Kent is not enrolled anywhere near my university. Neither are Jamie Tartt, Dani Rojas, Sam Obisanya, or any of their teammates. Rebecca Welton has a Faculty Reviewer role. Nathan Shelley and Trent Crimm are both teaching assistants. Trent, naturally, is an independent TA.

This is not frivolity. This is architecture, folks!

A demo course with real student names would expose FERPA-protected information to a faculty member I am screen-sharing with, a violation I have no interest in committing. A demo course with placeholder names like Student One and Student Two would be accurate but completely soulless. Like a dinner consisting of saltine crackers. Coach Beard’s Demo Course does the compliance work and the hospitality work simultaneously. Before I have explained a single feature, the faculty member on the other end of the call has already chuckled and relaxed. They know what kind of person they’re dealing with.

Did you hear that? That’s the sound of anxiety leaving the room.

We walked through the peer review assignment process in my demo course: low stakes, no live students, nothing that would wreak havoc into her active term course if we made a wrong turn. I explained the steps. I showed the nuances the online documentation skips because corporations write for the general case and her course is a specific one. And then I offered her a choice: did she want to walk through the steps herself in her own course, or did she want me to help her?

I give people the fish or I teach them to fish. Their call.

Even though my fourth email in the exchange claimed we could get things done in 20 to 30 minutes, sometime around the fourteen-minute mark, with the peer review assignment working correctly in her course, she said it.

I had no idea it could be this easy.

I smiled. I told her I was so happy to hear that versus, “This was a whole lot of annoying nerd work.” She laughed. We wrapped up.

After the Zoom meeting ended and I shut my webcam off, I sat with it for a moment, the way I always do.

Because that sentence, “I had no idea it could be this easy,” is not a compliment about my technical explanation. It is an indicator of relief melting away. It is what comes out when someone who has been frustrated for days, quietly embarrassed that they couldn’t figure out the thing they were supposed to be able to figure out, suddenly has it working and realizes the obstacle was never as immovable as it felt. I didn’t just solve the problem. I dissolved the anxiety that had built around it.

And you know what? It fuels me every single time. I did a good job teaching a teacher, even though I am not an official teacher. I am appreciated for my knowledge and for sharing it. Every time I hear those nine words, they affirm something I have believed for a long time: technology support could be done better. Significantly better. Immediately better. Not with new software or a reorganized ticketing system or a revised knowledge base.

With this.

Here is the part that breaks my heart a little.

Nobody teaches this to undergrads pursuing a degree in IT. I haven’t found any YouTube channels dedicated to showing technology support professionals how to read an email thread as a diagnostic tool, how to build a demo environment that does compliance work and hospitality work at the same time, how to offer someone the choice between the fish and the fishing lesson. There is no online certification training for any of this. If there was, I’d have already achieved it.

What I do isn’t secret ninja skills learned at the top of a mountain in Tibet. It is basic human kindness. And a razor-sharp sense of humor.

The exhale after 14 minutes is available to anyone willing to show up that way. Most people just never found out it was on the table.

More later...

When I was a kid, I was the one who finished the spot-the-difference puzzle before anyone else at the table had picked up their pencil. Two nearly identical panels sitting side by side, and somewhere in there a lampshade had lost its stripe, a clock had gained a hand, a bird had quietly vacated a branch. Most people scan both panels and see the same picture twice. I couldn’t not see the difference. The mismatch announced itself.

I didn’t know then that I was building a professional superpower. I just thought everyone saw what I saw.

They don’t.

There is a version of technology support that looks like this: a ticket comes in, a link gets pasted, the ticket closes. Another ticket comes in with the same question. Another link gets pasted. Wash, rinse, repeat until Friday. This ain’t laziness, it’s obedience. The institution built a system that rewards closing tickets, not preventing them. So that’s what gets done. Nobody ever got a performance review that said “Outstanding work not generating tickets this quarter!”

The system doesn’t encourage you to notice. It wants you to respond.

I spend a significant part of my day inside Instructure Canvas — clicking into courses, masquerading as faculty accounts to see what they see for support purposes, and performing administrative tasks that are never ticket-worthy because the client never knew they needed them. I’ve been doing this for nine years. Believe me, I know what Canvas looks like. I know what it looks like at 8am on a quiet Tuesday and what it looks like the morning after Instructure deployed an update over the weekend.

One Monday morning I clicked my bookmark to load my Canvas dashboard, and noticed something was wrong.

The global navigation menu — the blue vertical column that sits on the left side of every Canvas account, the one that never changes — had a new icon in it. I have looked at that column approximately ten thousand times. I’m not joking. I know what belongs there. This new icon did not belong there.

I did not wait for a ticket. I did not wait for a colleague to mention it in our Microsoft Teams channel. I did not wait for my inbox to fill up. I immediately started drilling down to the area in the administrator zone where I could disable this icon for all personnel.

Something in that weekend’s update had misfired and enabled a feature that had no business being enabled. One checkbox, checked by accident, visible to every client at every institution that received the same update.

I unchecked it, I verified it was gone, I took another sip of my water bottle, and moved on with my morning.

The course navigation menu in Canvas is a different story. A potentially volatile story. Unlike the global navigation column, which most faculty ignore the way you ignore the margins of a page, the course navigation menu is where faculty live. It is the left-side list of links inside their own course. They customized it. They see it every morning and know what belongs there.

On two separate occasions I have clicked into a faculty course to perform a requested change, noticed something unexpected in that navigation menu, and felt the split-second alert that nine years of pattern recognition produces. Something is off. I opened three random courses in the active term. Same unexpected item in each course. Instructure had pushed an update, and the update had quietly added a menu item to every course navigation menu at my institution.

I didn’t wait for the emails. I knew they were coming. Faculty notice when their course navigation menu has something unexpected in it. Faculty email me immediately, and they do not email me one at a time. It’s a dogpile of messages.

I went to my admin zone. I found the checkbox located in a different area than the global navigation menu glitch. I unchecked it. I verified in those three random courses that it was gone. By the time the first faculty member logged in that morning, the anomaly had already been eliminated.

Here is what the alternative looks like.

The institution that doesn’t notice finds out about Instructure’s oops the way institutions always find out: the ticket system’s inbox queue is flooded with the same issue. The help desk begins the copy-paste response. A content-approved alert gets published to a centralized IT support webpage. The same explanation goes out twenty times, then forty. A manager or director in a project coordination meeting will not hear about it until the weekly team meeting, assuming someone remembers to bring it up. The ticket, meanwhile, has to find its way through the routing system to the one person with the administrative rights to actually fix the underlying problem. That routing takes time. During that time, clients get grumpy. The help desk is drowning. The fix that takes thirty seconds once it reaches the right hands has been sitting in a queue for two hours, maybe three.

All of it — the tickets, the routing, the status updates — exists in large part to manage problems that a different kind of attention would have prevented.

The institutional machine is enormous. It kicks into gear the moment the ticket system’s inbox fills up. It never asks why the inbox filled up.

Here is where things get absurd. A technologist who prevents the wave doesn’t just go unrecognized — they may actually look underperforming! Fewer tickets closed? A quieter queue? Less volume to point to at the end of the week? The institution’s efficiency criteria has no instrument sensitive enough to detect what didn’t happen. It can only count what did.

The tech who let the wave hit and spent the day copy-pasting has the numbers to show for it. The one who stopped it before breakfast does not.

Nobody sat in a conference room and decided to penalize prevention. The institution built a system that measures response, assumed response was the job, and has been faithfully measuring it ever since. This flaw isn’t malicious, friends. It’s structural. Which is somehow worse.

A technologist who notices — who has trained their pattern recognition across years of daily immersion and brings that instinct to work every morning — is an institutional asset of a kind that no performance review ever captured. Observance and proactivity are not personality quirks to be tolerated. They are professional traits worth celebrating. The value is not in the tickets closed. It is in defusing bombs before they go off.

Trendspotting is never a skill that appears on a job posting. Nobody advertised for a Canvas administrator with hyperobservational pattern recognition and a childhood gift for spot-the-difference puzzles. The institution hired me to manage an LMS. The institution measures tickets closed, response time, and client satisfaction scores.

The spot-the-difference kid grew up and went to work inside a complex system, and every morning he logs in and looks at it the same way he looked at those two panels as a child. Not because anyone asked him to. Because he cannot not see it.

The mismatch announces itself. And then, quietly, it disappears.

More later...

I hear it from tenured faculty with three degrees on the wall. I hear it from PhD researchers who have forgotten more about their field than most people will ever learn. I hear it from adjuncts, staff, and first-year students. I hear it from people who have navigated complex institutions for decades and people who arrived last term.

I feel so dumb about this.

It crosses every credential boundary without exception. And because it does, I stopped taking it literally a long time ago.

Here is what I believe “I feel dumb” actually means. It’s not a confession. It’s not a cognitive self-assessment. It is an act of involuntary supplication — a client lowering themselves in the presence of someone who holds, in this one particular moment, in this one particular domain, a piece of knowledge they do not have. The phrase compresses an entire posture of vulnerability into five words and offers it up before you can make them feel worse.

Let me be precise about what that supplication is built on. The technology professional knows where a setting is located in a piece of software. That is the extent of the hierarchy. Not wisdom. Not general intelligence. Not thirty years of accumulated human experience. One setting. One software application. One area of life that the client never needed to master because it was never their job to master it.

And on the strength of that single asymmetry, a human being prostrates themselves.

The technology professional who accepts that prostration — who lets “I feel dumb” land without challenge, who offers a reflexive “don’t worry about it” and moves straight to the keyboard — is doing something they should be ashamed of. I have to assume they meant no harm. Because intention is not the standard. The standard is what actually happens to the person sitting across from you. And what happens, thousands of times a day across every help desk and support interaction in every institution, is that a capable human being submits to a manufactured hierarchy and nobody pushes back.

Hold my beverage and watch me push back.

I raise an index finger — gently, as a pause, not a correction — and I say their name. “[First name], I’m going to stop you right there. I will not tolerate any self-deprecating speak in my consults. There is no reason for you to feel dumb.”

And then I ask the question that is not reassurance, but logic.

“How could you have known where the solution to this issue was located if you have never experienced this issue before?”

I let that sit. Then: “None of my clients are dumb. So no more negative talk, okay?”

The distinction matters enormously. I am not telling them they are smart. What I am doing is dismantling the premise entirely. The question reframes the situation from a test they failed to an experience they simply haven’t had yet. Those are not the same thing and the difference is not small.

The client who says “I feel dumb” about a learning management system has never been fully trained on that system. The one who says it about a software configuration has never been shown the advanced configuration settings. In every case, the logical answer to “how could you have known?” is identical: you couldn’t have. There was nothing to know from. The knowledge gap is not evidence of deficiency. It is evidence of a different job description.

What happens after I say these three statements? Things get quiet. Sometimes there is a thank you. More often there is just a nod — small, genuine, a real acknowledgment that something landed. And then we get back to work.

Their self-deprecating phrase rarely reappears for the rest of the session. And often for future consultations.

That’s the part worth sitting with. The client didn’t just feel better in the moment. The premise they were operating from actually changed. They came in bracing for a hierarchy that confirmed their smallness. The index finger and the question told them that hierarchy was never real.

This is the driving force behind everything I have written in this series. The moment of technological vulnerability is one of the most human moments there is — a person standing at the edge of something they don’t understand, hoping the person on the other side treats them with dignity. That hope should not be a gamble.

I refuse to make it one.

More later...

There is a uniform.

You know the one. Khaki pants. Light blue button-down shirt. Maybe a polo if it’s a casual Friday. It has been the default wardrobe of the male office worker since roughly 1987, and the movie Office Space didn’t invent it so much as immortalize it — Bill Lumbergh in his long-sleeve button-down with a yellow tie, coffee mug in hand, asking about the TPS reports with the affect of a man who stopped feeling things sometime during the Reagan administration. The uniform signals compliance. It communicates nothing else.

The IT profession took the uniform and added a personality to match.

If you’ve seen The IT Crowd, you know the archetype. Moss and Roy are brilliant at the technical work and virtually incapable of human interaction. Their office looks like a Toys R Us exploded in it. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” became the running joke — and then the reputation. Not just for those two fictional characters, but for an entire profession. The tech support stereotype was set: socially inept, affectless, fluent in jargon, allergic to small talk, most comfortable when the human on the other side of the desk stops talking and lets them work.

I am not that person. Let me tell you why.

When I darken a client’s office doorway, the first thing they register is not a light blue button-down. They register a large man in dark clothing — a deliberate, consistent wardrobe choice that is stylish without being theatrical, black without venturing anywhere near goth territory. No khakis. No polo. A well-kempt appearance, a light and considered application of cologne, and a folio with a fountain pen tucked under one arm. No mobile phone in sight.

The expectation on their face is readable. They were bracing for someone else entirely.

Then I open my mouth.

Within the first thirty seconds, they are chuckling. Not because I have deployed a memorized icebreaker from a customer service training manual, but because I read the room on the walk over and arrived with something that fits this specific person on this specific afternoon. I know my audience. I do not make references, attempt humor, or use catchphrases that the person across from me won’t recognize. With a twentysomething graduate student, the register is completely different than with a faculty member who remembers when television had three channels. The wit is calibrated, not canned.

I was ten years old when I figured out I was funny. Voice impressions of celebrities. A room full of kids and grown-ups laughing with me, not at me. I understood the difference early. I filed it away and kept going.

Decades later, that ten-year-old is still in the room with me. I’m guiding the elder faculty member through mouse clicks and important information to type, and when they reach the final step and the problem resolves, the line arrives — “Now you’re cookin’ with Crisco.” They laugh a real laugh. Because they know exactly what that means. Loretta Lynn, circa 1981, telling America that Crisco will do ya proud every time. A product that has been in American kitchens for decades, now deployed in a faculty office as a small celebration. It lands because it is specific, unexpected, and entirely audience-aware.

Moss and Roy were funny because they couldn’t help it. I am funny on purpose. There is a difference.

Breaking the IT tech stereotype goes well beyond wardrobe and wit. I meet with people every day who have every reason to walk into a support interaction bracing for something unpleasant. Transgender clients, gay and lesbian clients, gender-fluid clients, people of every ethnicity and background — some of them carrying very visible chips on their shoulders, particularly when encountering a middle-aged white male who could, at first glance, read as a law enforcement official. I understand what that profile communicates before I say a word. I have always understood it.

None of them have left our interaction the way they arrived.

Not because I make a performance of inclusivity. Because I treat every single person who sits across from me as someone worth the full version of my attention, my care, and my competence. The conversational dignity I bring to a support session is not adjusted based on who entered the video meeting. It is consistent. It is genuine. And it is apparently unexpected enough to register.

My desk does not have a Funko Pop collection. My accessories are chosen deliberately. My confidence in quietly battling an unexpected problem is not performed — it comes from having seen enough unexpected problems to know that the answer is always findable. My cordiality is not scripted.

The stereotype persists because too many technology professionals either embraced it like a soft, plush Pokemon blanket or never thought to look beyond it. The khaki pants and light blue button-down signal something to every client before the tech opens their mouth — and what they signal is: this will be transactional, impersonal, and probably a little condescending.

I decided a long time ago that I was not going to signal that.

The support relationship begins the moment the client sees you in the doorway. Everything after that is either confirmation or contradiction of what they expected.

I choose to be the contradiction.

More later...

When I was a fifth grader, I couldn’t understand why some kids weren’t nice to me.

I wasn’t the kind of kid who shrugged it off. I genuinely wanted to know the reason. The confusion followed me home, to the dinner table, where I asked the question and received answers that would be fit for a Hallmark card but didn’t fit the situation. So I carried the question with me instead, for years, without a good answer. It was a heavy backpack to lug around, especially during adolescence.

What I got eventually wasn’t an answer. It was a workaround.

At twenty, I started lifting weights seriously. The bullying stopped around the same time — not because I went looking for confrontations, or because I was strong enough to carry that backpack of uncertainty, but because the confrontations stopped coming. Problem solved, more or less. Except it wasn’t really solved. I had changed the physical variable without answering the original question. I still didn’t know why some people were unkind. I just wasn’t an easy target anymore.

Fast forward a few decades. I am now, by most measures, a physically imposing person. Former black belt in Tae Kwon Do. I can bench press one-eighth of a ton. I have a shaved head, a trimmed goatee, a mostly-black wardrobe, and I take up a reasonable amount of space in a room. None of this matters in a university workplace, where positional authority beats physical presence every time. It definitely doesn’t matter where a tenured faculty member having a bad day and an elevated opinion of their own frustration can say things to a support professional that would land very differently in a parking lot at night.

I have been on the receiving end of those conversations.

There was one in particular. A diminutive woman in her upper fifties, borderline shouting at a man two decades younger, a foot taller, and a hundred pounds heavier. In any other context, the geometry of that situation resolves differently. But this was her office, her institution, her positional authority — and if the much larger man raised his voice in return, there would be no version of that story where anyone would take his side.

So I stood there, towering over her, and I did the hardest thing available to me. I checked my face. Deliberately. I made sure what she was seeing was calm. And when she paused for a breath, I raised one index finger — not aggressively, just a quiet, nonverbal request for a moment — and I said, “[First name], I am not responsible for this issue you are having. I am here to help. And even though you don’t seem to realize it right now, I am on your team.”

The monologue stopped.

I continued in my naturally deep baritone voice: “I have a couple of ideas up my sleeve that might fix this. Will you allow me to help you?”

She deflated. There was an apology. I smiled and thanked her for that. I then said, “Let’s see what we can do.”

I want to be honest about what made that possible, because it didn’t come naturally and it didn’t come quickly. Somewhere in the years between the dinner table and that faculty office, I had assembled a small set of mental tools that I now run, almost automatically, when an unkind email lands in my inbox or an unkind person is standing in front of me.

The first tool came from an unlikely place. There’s an episode of Ted Lasso where Coach Lasso tells a player to “be a goldfish” — the happiest animal in the ocean, because it forgets everything in ten seconds. The idea isn’t forgiveness exactly. It’s functional release. Don’t carry the transgression into the next moment. I found that useful, as far as it went.

But my version goes a step further than the goldfish. I don’t just release the unkindness. I replace it with a question: what would have to be true about this person’s life for them to be acting this way right now? Not as an excuse. As an explanation. There is more to their situation than I am aware of. There almost always is.

When I ask that question, something shifts. The hostility stops being personal and starts being data. I picture scrambled eggs sliding off a Teflon pan — the acerbic energy just doesn’t stick. And I remind myself: my response here could turn an adversary into an ally. Not always. But sometimes. And sometimes is worth trying for.

The woman who was shouting at me that afternoon is now someone I support with something close to genuine warmth. When we meet for video consults, I am proactive. “I am sure that is a stressball for you. Now you know me — I always have an idea up my sleeve. Let’s get things back to good.” She responds in kind. The relationship that followed that afternoon is better than it would have been if I had never been tested at all.

I still don’t fully know why some people are unkind. I stopped needing the answer a long time ago. What I know instead is that the charitable assumption — the deliberate choice to construct a generous explanation before responding — costs me nothing and occasionally changes everything.

The fifth grader at the dinner table would find that satisfying, I think.

More later...

Back before Zoom and Teams existed, my work involved in-person tech support. A call from a client meant ten minutes of preparation before I ever touched a keyboard.

Not ten minutes of Googling. Ten minutes of walking.

I’d hang up the phone, grab my notebook, get a drink of water, maybe use the restroom, and then spend the five-minute walk to their office doing something nobody could see: fixing the problem in my head. Every mouseclick. Every typed command. Every location on the computer desktop I’d need to access. I might not go directly to their office on that walk — I might sit down on a bench or nearby chair to run the whole sequence before I engaged with their computer, because the alternative was arriving unprepared and hearing a voice in my own head say, “You walked all this way and you don’t know how to fix it. Now they think you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I read something a long time ago that stuck: Success = Preparation + Opportunity. I wanted success in my job. So I prepared for it in my mind, on the walk over, before the opportunity arrived.

The result was that the fix was usually fast. Six minutes fast. I’d knock on the client’s office door, they would get up to greet me, let me sit in their desk chair to do the fixing, and if I saw them showing interest I’d narrate what I was doing. Then it was done. That six-minute visit was efficient. It was also a little awkward. I walked ten minutes each way for six minutes of work. My work calendar was blocked off for one hour with this client. Twenty minutes spent on walking. Six minutes doing the fix. That left 34 minutes unaccounted for.

At some point, I started asking the question.

“So what else is bugging you about your computer?”

The look on their face was something. Part bewilderment, part surprise, part actual thinking — like they were scanning a mental backlog they’d forgotten was there. Nobody in technology support had ever asked them that before. The question didn’t compute at first.

Most of the time, the answer was cordial and brief. “Not much. I’m good.” And that’s fine. They got a free refill of coffee before they left the restaurant. The opportunity was there; they just didn’t need it that day. No harm done.

But sometimes — and these are the visits I still remember — a conscientious faculty member would pause, and something would shift. They’d actually think about it. And out would come the thing they’d been quietly living with for three months. The printer behavior they’d chalked up to mystery. The shortcut that stopped working. The software some other tech installed on their computer and didn’t bother to introduce them to how it worked. The thing they’d decided wasn’t worth bothering anyone about.

It’s worth bothering about. It was always worth bothering about. They just didn’t know anyone would want to know.

There’s no script for this in the technology support world. The institutional incentive runs exactly the other direction — close the ticket, clear the queue, submit the TPS reports. The question I was asking had no place in the system. It was entirely off the books. What I was doing, without having a name for it at the time, was treating a faculty office like a table at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Not because there were tips involved. Not because I was angling for anything. Just because that’s the level of attention I thought the person deserved.

Here’s the part I didn’t fully understand until later. I wasn’t only giving something in those moments. I was filling my own tank.

Technology support receives a remarkable amount of misdirected anger. Stressed clients, impossible deadlines, problems that aren’t your fault being handed to you as though they are. You must learn to take the high road. You must learn to stay professional. You must learn not to be unkind in return, even when unkind would feel very satisfying.

What nobody tells you is where the fuel for that comes from. It doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from the visits that went the other way — the client who was genuinely appreciative, the faculty member who lit up when you asked what else was bothering them, the look on someone’s face when they realized they’d been heard. You carry those moments. You draw on them later when you need to stay human in a job that occasionally tries to make you stop being human.

The backlogged questions were never just about fixing computers. They were about the refill nobody asked for, offered anyway, because some people are worth the extra five minutes.

Most of them are, actually.

More later...

I get asked a question hundreds of times. Maybe more. I stopped counting somewhere around year three.

Every term, without fail, a faculty member who is new to the university — or new to the idea that their course has an online textbook component — sends me an email. The wording changes. The urgency level varies. The underlying question does not: How do my students get access to their online textbooks through Canvas?

I know the answer before I finish reading the subject line. I have known it for years. And I answer it the same way every time — not because I am reading from a script, but because the answer is genuinely good and the person asking genuinely needs it.

“My best recommendation to get your students access to those online textbooks is to contact the fabulous [name] in the bookstore. They have worked with lots of faculty about this same issue and would be able to get your textbooks connected to your course much faster than I ever could.”

That email takes me ninety seconds to write. It has taken me nine years to perfect.

There is a philosophy underneath that response that I have never written down until now.

The faculty member asking me that question is not the hundredth person to ask it. They are the first person — their first term, their first online textbook, their first realization that Canvas and the bookstore are connected in ways nobody explained during new faculty orientation. Their confusion is real. Their timeline is real. The students sitting in their course waiting for access are real.

None of that changes because I have seen it before.

I say this not as a noble declaration but as a practical discipline. The moment I start treating a recurring question as an inconvenience is the moment my response degrades — slightly clipped, slightly less warm, slightly less useful. The client feels it even if they can’t name it. And the next time something goes wrong in their course, they will hesitate before emailing me. That hesitation is a detriment to the relationship.

So I don’t let myself get there.

My inner narrative when a familiar question arrives sounds something like this: Yup. They must not be aware of this one either. I’m glad I know the answer. Let me think about how to explain it well.

That is not patience. Patience implies suffering through something. This is my choice to reframe the situation:

The question isn’t old. The person is new. Every time is the first time.

Those are not the same thing and conflating them is where a lot of technology support goes quietly wrong.

I will also say to them, without apology: “This is a good question. I’m glad you asked that.”

Is that a performance? No. Here is what it actually is: a flag planted in the ground against every Knowledge Base article ever written by a manager who would rather point people at documentation than pay someone to answer the phone. Every time I tell a faculty member their question was worth asking out loud, I am making an argument that a human being is worth more than a hyperlink. The more often I make that argument in practice, the less often they suffer in silence, and the less often a small confusion becomes a full-blown crisis at 8am on the first day of term.

Does answering the same question repeatedly wear me down? No. Does it bore me? No. Does it quietly reduce the volume of panicked emails I receive later in the term when small confusions have compounded into real problems? Every single time.

The bookstore referral is worth examining for one more thing it does that I rarely see in technology support: it names a person.

Not “contact the bookstore.” Not “submit a request through the campus ticketing system.” The fabulous [name]. A specific human being I am personally endorsing, whose competence I am staking my own credibility on, who will pick up the thread and carry it further than I could.

That is not a deflection. That is the consigliere model in a single sentence. I don’t have to know everything. I have to know who knows — and I have to make the introduction warm enough that the client arrives at the right door already feeling taken care of.

Sometimes, during a consultation, a faculty member will look at me — genuinely puzzled — and ask how I know all of this. Every setting, every workaround, every little-known secret, every shortcut. The answer I give them is the most honest thing I say all day:

“[first name], I do this forty hours a week.”

Not a boast. Not a flex. Just the plainest possible explanation for why someone who has been doing the same job for nine years knows the job. The expertise isn’t magic. It’s repetition — applied with intention, maintained with care, and treated every single time like it’s worth doing right.

The people who email me are not bothering me. They are trusting me. That trust arrived in their inbox along with my reply to the last thing they asked, and the thing before that, and the thing before that.

Every email is a deposit in an account I have been building for nine years. I am not about to make a careless withdrawal because I already know the answer.

More later...

The technical work hasn’t started yet. I haven’t looked at a single Canvas setting in the course, clicked a single menu item, or offered a single solution. We are thirty seconds into a Zoom call and the most important work of the consultation is already done.

Most technology support professionals don’t know this window exists.

Before the call begins, I’ve done one thing: I’ve read the email. Not skimmed it. Read it. I know why this person asked for a meeting, what they’ve already tried, and roughly what kind of answer they’re hoping for. By the time they see my face on their screen, I already know their name, their course, and their problem. They will not have to explain themselves twice.

My browser window is already shared. Not my desktop — just the browser, clean and uncluttered, with their Canvas account ready to go. No minimizing windows. No apologizing for the sticky note collection on my taskbar. The space is prepared. They arrive to a room that was set up for them. And the pillow is fluffed.

When my client enters the video consultation I greet them with: “Good afternoon, [first name]. How is Thursday treating you so far?”

Not “how are you.” That question has no real answer and everyone knows it. A specific question about a specific day requires a specific response — and in the two seconds it takes them to answer, something shifts. They’re not in crisis mode anymore. They’re in conversation. That transition is the whole game.

If we’ve exchanged a few emails before landing here, I’ll follow up with: “I’m glad we can meet live-time like this. I can imagine you’re getting tired of seeing my nerdy emails flooding your inbox.”

Just between you and me, I sent exactly two follow-up emails. This is not flooding. But I’m giving them permission to have been mildly frustrated anyway — and I’m taking the weight of that friction onto myself before they have to decide whether to mention it. The self-deprecating “nerdy emails” does its own work: it signals that I’m not precious about my expertise. The email format wasn’t right for the problem. That’s on me, not them.

Or: “I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me during a busy Thursday. I have a feeling ten or fifteen minutes of walking through some nerdy stuff together will be better than a bullet-point filled techy email.”

Something just happened. I told them exactly how long this will take — and made it sound almost enjoyable. “Nerdy stuff together” is conspiratorial. We’re both in on the joke. The anxiety about an open-ended call with an IT person evaporates in one sentence.

Now I’m ready to begin. And here is the move that took me the longest to learn:

“I see in your email you’re interested in taking care of [their particular task]. Why don’t you guide me to what you’re seeing in your course?”

I ask them to navigate before I start driving.

Most technology support professionals arrive and immediately slam the accelerator on their own. They quickly navigate to the problem and begin explaining. The client becomes a spectator in their own consultation. I do the opposite. I ask them to direct me first — tell me where to go, show me what they see — because sometimes the destination they have in mind isn’t where they actually need to end up. They’re in the backseat telling me to take a left at the stoplight, into the parking lot on the right, and park in this spot. I get them there. But they chose the destination.

By the time I say my first technical word, the client knows several things that have nothing to do with Canvas. They know I prepared for this meeting. They know I’m not in a hurry. They know I’m not going to make them feel foolish for asking. They know approximately when they’ll be back to their workday.

None of this happened by accident. Every piece of it is deliberate — the shared screen, the specific greeting, the self-deprecating acknowledgment of the email exchange, the time estimate wrapped in humor, the navigator in the backseat. It took years of iteration to develop and I couldn’t have told you I was doing it consciously until I started writing these essays and had to examine it out loud.

The client doesn’t experience any of this as technique. They experience it as relief.

That’s the thirty seconds most IT professionals are spending on the wrong problem. They’re already thinking about the technical solution. I’m thinking about the person who needs to feel safe enough to receive it.

The technical work starts after that. But the relationship — the thing that determines whether they email me next time instead of suffering in silence or firing off a ticket into the void — that was settled before I said anything useful at all.

More later...

There is a thought I have never said out loud to a client.

It arrives when a faculty member emails me wanting Canvas to do something Canvas simply cannot do. Or when a student expects their newly-enrolled course to appear in their dashboard before the student information system has had time to process it. The thought is vivid, and entirely unhelpful: 

Well, I want my car to levitate 120 feet in the air so I don’t have to deal with rush hour traffic. But my car can’t do that.

I have never said this. I will never say this. The thought stays where it belongs — inside my head.

There are three flavors of “Canvas can’t do that” and they require different handling.

The first is genuine limitation. A teacher wants a feature added to their course that the platform simply isn’t built to support. My response: “Unfortunately it is not possible to [their specific request] in your course.” No bureaucratic softening. Clean. Direct. If there’s an alternative that gets them close to what they need, I offer it. If there isn’t, I say so and leave the door open. For the ones I know have a sense of humor, I lead with ‘Now please don’t shoot the messenger’ — a line that usually gets a chuckle and defuses whatever frustration was building in the subject line.

The second flavor is a feature that exists but hasn’t been implemented yet — often because the Canvas community forums are documenting enough bugs that deploying it during an academic term would create more problems than it solves. My response sounds like this: “Based on numerous comments in the online Canvas forum describing errors with the feature, we have chosen to exercise caution with releasing it this academic term. We’ll be watching the forum posts and will evaluate whether next term is an appropriate time once the bugs have been addressed.” Diplomatic. Specific. And true.

The third flavor — which isn’t really a limitation at all — is the expectation gap. A student enrolls in a course online and immediately expects it to appear in their Canvas dashboard. It doesn’t. They email me, mildly panicked. My reply: “Unlike the Google Docs experience, which saves changes in a few seconds, it takes four to six hours for enrollment changes to be updated in Canvas courses each weekday. If you still don’t see your course by tomorrow morning, send us an email and we’ll be happy to troubleshoot.”

I never hear back from them. The course appears. They move on with their day. The anxiety was real and the resolution was simple — they just needed someone to explain the clock.

What all three of these responses have in common is something that took me years to develop deliberately: the client never feels refused. They feel informed. They feel considered. And they feel like the relationship is still intact on the other side of the answer.

Most technology support treats a “no” as the end of the interaction. Not one why given. Ticket closed. Move on. I treat it as a transition. If their email is unclear about what they’re actually trying to accomplish, I offer a Zoom or Teams call to talk through it. Sometimes what they’re asking for isn’t what they actually need, and five minutes of listening reveals a path that the email exchange never would have found. Every response closes with something like “do keep me posted on any future issues or annoyances you encounter with your courses” — because the goal isn’t to resolve one request. The goal is to be the person they think of when the next one arrives.

The answer to the request may be no. The answer to the relationship is always yes.

Here is what the backstage of my work looks like. It isn’t always clean.

When an angsty faculty member doesn’t accept my answer — when “it’s not possible” meets a temper tantrum and a forwarded email to my upper management demanding the impossible — I don’t have the luxury of institutional backing. Management with low trust of their employees is unlikely to respond with, “he’s right, he’s the admin, he’s the expert.” What they want is cited quotations from an external source. Documentation. A Tier II support transcript from the company that makes Canvas. Proof that the car genuinely cannot levitate, sourced from someone other than the person whose job it is to know.

So before I deliver a “not possible” to anyone I suspect might escalate, I confirm with Tier II support and save the transcript. Not because I doubt my own expertise. Because I’ve learned that expertise without documentation is an argument I’ll lose, and an argument I lose costs the client more than it costs me.

The levitating car thought stays internal. The transcript goes in the file. That’s the job.

The relational technologist’s version of no isn’t a door closing. It’s a conversation continuing in a different direction — toward what’s actually possible, toward what they actually need but haven’t considered, toward the next time they’ll need someone in their corner who already knows their name.

The car can’t levitate. But I’ll tell you what it can do.

More later...

One is an anomaly, two is a curiosity, three is a trend.

I’ve said that for about a decade. It’s pattern recognition distilled into nine words. And a few times a year — often at the start of a new academic term — the student emails arrive in a cluster. An old course still haunting their dashboard. They weren’t expecting to see it. They’d like it gone. The first one is an anomaly. The second one raises an eyebrow. By the third, I’m no longer looking at individual emails. I’m looking at a trend.

If you want to know how I handled the individual emails, that’s Essay 14. This essay is about what happened when I decided one at a time wasn’t good enough.

The thing about a cluster of emails is that it carries a warning inside it. Three students found the problem and wrote to me. How many didn’t? If you were to average 20 students enrolled in a typical university course, that’s well over 100 students with outdated courses still in their dashboard. How many just quietly assumed that Canvas always looks like this — cluttered with ghosts of terms past — and went about their day? How many faculty members were sitting on the same issue without a single student ever mentioning it?

The cluster wasn’t just a workload. It was a signal. And the signal was telling me something larger was out there waiting.

So I did what I always do when a problem needs thinking rather than doing. I walked away from the screen. I sat down on the sofa with some quiet music and a beverage. And I visualized.

This is not a minor detail. The sofa is part of the process. The beverage is part of the process. Thirty years of technology support has taught me that the best solutions don’t come from staring harder at the screen — that only gives you eye strain and a headache. The best solutions come from creating enough mental space for the answer to find you. I let the problem sit in my mind without forcing it. I walked through the landscape of the LMS the way you’d walk through a building you know by heart, looking for the door you hadn’t tried yet.

Eventually it appeared. A course report.

Every Canvas administrator has access to a set of reports in their admin zone. One of them — a Provisioning report — can generate a complete list of courses for a given academic term, exported as an Excel file. I’d used it before for other purposes. But sitting on that sofa, I realized it was exactly the instrument I needed.

I pulled the report. Opened the Excel file. And then came what I can only describe as my hyper-clicky phase — sorting columns, filtering data, cross-referencing term dates against course settings. It’s not glamorous work. It’s the data equivalent of turning over rocks. But after a few minutes of methodical sorting and discovering, the answer emerged: five, six, maybe nine courses from a past term still sitting open with no end date. Ghosts in the machine, every one of them.

From there, the execution was fast. Keyboard shortcuts to locate each course in my admin zone. Four clicks per course. Participation field switched from Course back to Term. Update Course Details. Next tab.

Wash, rinse, repeat for each academic term, going back in time just like that Huey Lewis & the News song.

Eight academic quarters. Two years of institutional back doors opened. Closed in thirty minutes.

Think about what actually happened in those thirty minutes. Every student across all those courses — none of whom had emailed me, none of whom knew they had an advocate, none of whom were aware that a past-term course was still following them around — now had a clean dashboard. The faculty members whose courses I quietly concluded never received a confusing email asking for permission to fix a settings oversight from eighteen months ago. The cluster of student emails that had been building toward a flood simply... stopped coming.

The Keeper of the Springs, John Ortberg writes, traveled from spring to spring in the hills above the village, removing debris no one else saw, keeping the water clean. The town was healthy because of work nobody could see or measure... or put on a spreadsheet.

What I did on that sofa — and in the thirty minutes that followed — was to stop tending the springs I stumbled across and to start mapping the entire watershed. Same ethic. Larger canvas. Different costume.

The student emails stopped. The dashboards cleared. Kids kept playing in the playground.

Give thanks for the unseen work.

The email arrives on a random Tuesday. No exclamation points, no URGENT in the subject line. A student has an old course still sitting on their Canvas dashboard — a course they finished last semester, maybe three semesters ago — and they’d like it gone. The tone is somewhere between mildly puzzled and mildly annoyed. A pebble in the shoe. A two out of ten on the distress scale.

I’ve received some version of this email many times over nine years. Which means I’ve already diagnosed the problem and pinpointed the solution before I finish reading the first sentence.

The teacher of that course wanted their students to have access before the official term start date, so they changed a single setting — switching the course’s Participation field from Term to Course and specifying a custom start date. Reasonable. Common. The problem is they never set a custom end date. By default, academic courses conclude automatically when the term ends. Manually-modified courses don’t. They stay open indefinitely. They follow students around like a lost dog long after the last assignment was submitted.

The fix: a keyboard shortcut to locate the course, click into Settings, click the Participation field, switch it from Course back to Term, click Update Course Details. Under twenty seconds. And poof. The course vanishes from the student’s dashboard. It also vanishes from all classmates’ dashboards as well. The student reported a splinter. I quietly operated on the whole hand.

Now, I could go through proper channels...

I could forward the student’s email to the teacher of the course, explain the issue, outline the solution, and offer them the option of fixing it themselves or granting me permission to fix it on their behalf. I could wait for a response. The student could wait for a response. The teacher — who is almost certainly in the middle of a new term, with new students, new deadlines, new pressures — would receive a mildly confusing email about a course they haven’t thought about for a year, informing them that one of their former students is still seeing it, and could they please do something about it or at least reply saying I can. That could create a whole new help ticket of support for a confused faculty.

That chain of interactions — four, five emails, potentially spanning days — protects the institution’s documentation trail. It does not protect the relationship. It does not serve the student. It does not serve the teacher, who would rather not know they left a course running for potentially fourteen months.

So I make a different call. With their best interests in mind, I make the fix. I fire off a quick email thanking the student for the heads up. Done.

Please note: this isn’t recklessness dressed up as efficiency. After thousands of interactions with my clients, I carry a mental rolodex of who they are and how they work. Most of them are glad to have me handle things quietly on their behalf. But some of my clients are possessive about their courses — their content, their settings, their product. If one of those names shows up as the instructor of record on an unconcluded course, I call an audible. I slow down. I pick up the phone. I go through channels.

Professional judgment isn’t the same as skipping the paperwork. It’s knowing when the paperwork serves the people involved and when it only serves the institution.

There’s an allegory I return to when I think about this work. John Ortberg writes about a small Alpine town built along a beautiful stream. High in the hills, invisible to everyone below, lives the Keeper of the Springs — an old man who travels from spring to spring, removing debris, clearing blockages, keeping the water clean. The town is healthy because of work nobody sees. When the town council decides he’s a luxury they can no longer afford, the water slowly goes brackish. The swans leave. People get sick. They rehire him. The stream runs clear again.

The life of the village, Ortberg writes, depends on the health of the stream.

I think about that old man on a random Tuesday when a student email arrives and I’m four clicks and twenty seconds away from resolving it. I think about the classmates who will simply open their dashboard like usual and find it clean, with no idea that anyone was ever working on their behalf.

No ticket filed. No support portal visited. No email sent to the teacher.

Just a clean dashboard, and a stream that runs clear.

Give thanks for the unseen work.

There is a sentence I have said hundreds of times, in person and in writing, over the better part of a decade. I have it memorized the way a surgeon has a pre-op checklist memorized. Not because I am reading from a card, but because the words matter enough to get right every time.

While I never make changes to a professor’s course without prior permission... with your best interests, and your students’ interests, in mind... I took the liberty of [what I did, specifically, for you].

Read it again. There is more engineering in that sentence than it appears.

The first part establishes the academic ownership boundary involving course content and signals that I know it exists. The second part names whose stakes are on the table; the teacher’s, and the students sitting in their course who never emailed me and probably won’t. The third part lands the work itself almost as an afterthought, because by the time I get there, the client already knows I acted from values, not impulse.

No form produced that sentence. No institutional policy committee drafted it. It came from thirty years of understanding how my faculty clients closely guard their course curriculum.

Management, at various points in my career, wanted forms. Authorized acknowledgments. Paper trails. The institutional reflex toward liability reduction is as reliable as gravity. When something goes wrong, the first question is always “do we have documentation?” The form is the answer to that question. Fill it out, get a signature, file it somewhere no one will ever look until the day someone needs to point a finger.

I understand the instinct. I just don’t agree with it.

Forms protect the institution. They do not protect the relationship.

A form says: My backside is covered. My sentence says: I see you. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most technology support goes heartbreakingly wrong.

The alternative I built is called the visual receipt. Instead of busting out an email with extensive descriptions of changes made to a course, a list of technical actions that would mean little to most faculty and nothing to the students whose term is on the line, I record a short narrated screencast. Two minutes, maybe three. I walk through exactly what I found, exactly what I did, and exactly why. The client’s first name, their course, their specific situation. Not a knowledge base article. Not a horribly-formatted ticket closure notice. A personal document made for them, delivered as a link in an email crafted to make them want to click it.

The institution wanted documentation. It got documentation. It also got a faculty member who felt like someone actually showed up for them, which is not something any form has ever produced.

That is not defiance. That is the same destination by a road the institution forgot to imagine.

Here is what I know after nearly three decades of tech support: the relational approach does not compete with institutional goals. It exceeds them. Lower friction. Fewer escalations. Clients who come back with the next problem instead of going around you or going silent. The visual receipt generates a paper trail and a grateful faculty member and a documented methodology and a client who now understands what happened to their own course. The institution got more than it asked for. It simply never thought to ask.

The sentence is how I protect the relationship. The visual receipt is how I honor it. And somewhere in the thirty years of doing both, I have built a list of people who can speak to my professionalism that no form could ever replicate.

That list is the real documentation.

More later...

The subject line says URGENT. The body of the email confirms it — exclamation points, fragmented sentences, the digital equivalent of someone grabbing you by the lapels. I read it once, nod slowly, and already know what happened before I’ve opened a web browser tab.

This is what nine years of pattern recognition feels like. The URGENT subject line isn’t chaos to me. It’s a signal I’ve seen before. I already know where the exit is. And I’m not gonna lie, it puts a big ol’ smile on my face.

Here’s the first flavor of Oh Crikey.

A teacher wants to do something kind for a student who missed a quiz. In their Canvas course, the teacher brings up the quiz, and assigns it specifically to that one student with a new start and end date. Benevolent intention. Catastrophic result.

What the teacher didn’t know — what nobody told them, because this is the kind of thing that lives in the fine print of a platform most faculty never dive into — is that assigning a quiz to a single student removes it from everyone else. The quiz vanishes from the student’s course view, and scores disappear from their gradebook. Then the emails start arriving from students. Lots of them, all at once. And finally, the distress beacon lands in my inbox with URGENT in the subject line. And their stress level goes way over 88 miles per hour.

I open the course. I open the quiz settings. I see exactly what happened. I click “Assign To,” select “Everyone Else,” set the start and end dates to something in the recent past since the original dates are gone, and click Save. I check the gradebook. Every score is back.

The whole intervention took less time than it took the teacher to compose their panicked email.

My email reply is calibrated to the person on the other end. For some, it’s formal and measured: “I think I spotted what was going on. I made some adjustments behind the scenes with your best interests in mind.” For others — the ones I know, the ones who’ve been in my corner long enough to receive the full version of me — it’s a smiley emoji and a link to their gradebook and: “I think we’re in a better place now?”

Effusive, gushing email reply arriving in my inbox in three, two, one.

Here’s the second flavor.

A teacher has been building content in their course for hours. Lecture notes, class to-do items, curriculum carefully organized, exactly the way they want their students to encounter the material. And then — a click in the wrong place, a confirmation dialog dismissed without reading, the specific brand of accidental that happens to everyone eventually — the assignment is gone. Possibly the gradebook column disappears with it. Student submissions, if there were any, apparently vanished into the void.

The email I receive is not calm.

What I know, and what the teacher does not, is that Canvas doesn’t actually delete things. Not immediately. Not permanently. Deleted content goes to a sort of purgatory zone — an area built into every course that is found in one of those hidden alleys that most people never visit. Every deleted item sits there with a date and time stamp, waiting. I navigate to that unmarked door, knock the secret knock, find the item by keyword and timestamp, and restore it. Content back. Scores back. Submissions back.

I tell every new client about this purgatory zone the first time we meet. I don’t wait for the panic. I actually delete a sample assignment — live, in front of them, while they watch with mild alarm — and then walk them through the restoration. “Now you might be thinking: ‘What the heck, Chris! You just deleted my assignment and all my students’ work. You jerk.’ If this ever happens, please exhale? And send me an email. I’m happy to help bring things back to their original location before they were deleted.”

It’s not verbally articulated, but I can sense my client thinking, “This is heavy. He’s my go-to guy.”

Here’s the third flavor, which requires a brief diplomatic interlude.

Two teachers share a course. They are both building content, which is as collaborative and occasionally collision-prone as it sounds. One teacher updates a content page. In doing so, they overwrite their colleague’s carefully constructed lecture notes. The colleague discovers this, does not immediately assume the charitable intention, and sends me an email that contains both a technical question and the faint outline of an interpersonal situation I will now need to navigate simultaneously.

Canvas saves a version of a content page every time it is saved. There is a page history — a complete record of every edit, with timestamps, going back to the beginning. I make a screencast. I walk the teacher through finding the history, reading the timestamps, identifying the version they want. And then, because this is the moment that calls for it, I reach for the cultural reference that has served me well across nine years of faculty support.

So if you don’t want your page to have this current content, you can take the DeLorean back in time to your previous saved version, click this button to confirm your decision, and blammo — your page content is back the way you originally had it.

And then, because the technical problem is solved but the interpersonal one is still sitting in the room: “Sometimes we are unaware of our partner’s edits in course content. I hope you won’t be too upset now that we know how to restore your content.”

I will get a big hug from their reply email and, occasionally, “I had no idea Canvas could do that.”

That phrase — I had no idea Canvas could do that — is the one I hear most often after a rescue. Not “thank you for sending a specific email confirming authorization for me to make changes to your course” or “I appreciate you reading the online documentation guide and following the proper procedures.” Just genuine surprise that the platform they’ve been using contains capabilities nobody ever showed them.

This is the part that management, bless their cortisol-soaked hearts, never quite understood about the personalized approach. The URGENT email isn’t just a problem to be solved. It’s a discovery waiting to happen. Every rescue is also an education. Every Oh Crikey moment is an opportunity to show someone that the safety net exists, that the DeLorean is parked right there, and I’m leaning on the door in a white lab coat like Doc Brown, lowering my sunglasses and saying, “Where we’re going, we don’t need to re-create Canvas content from scratch.”

I think we’re in a better place now.

More later...

The fifth one confirmed it for me.

Four email responses before it, I’d read the same words and it never registered with me — “Awesome! Thank you so much,” “This was SOOOOO helpful,” “I watched it three times” — and filed them somewhere between relief and exhaustion. But the fifth one made me exhale for the first time in three weeks. Not because the praise was louder. Because I finally believed it wasn’t a fluke.

It was back in Spring 2020. You might remember it being the time when education left the classroom and went fully remote. I remember it as an incredibly stressful season in my career. My university had two weeks to move two thousand faculty members from in-person instruction to fully online. Colleagues were running back-to-back group webinars across a very busy quarter break doing the impossible work of getting an entire institution functional on a platform many of them had only used to augment their in-person pedagogy. For a number of months, I felt like a tutor in the help center — the one faculty came to after the group sessions, confused about the thing they’d been shown once and couldn’t find on their own.

Sound familiar?

Instead of being present in the group seminars, my role was to manage two email inboxes simultaneously: my own and the shared Canvas support inbox. What arrived in those inboxes was the full human spectrum of a profession in crisis. There were urgent requests from faculty who needed their course available to students before the term started and had no idea how to do it. There were panicked emails from professors who needed to create assignments and quizzes originating from Microsoft Office documents. There were emails with attachments — syllabi, slide deck presentations, and more — with an implicit expectation that I would place them in the appropriate area of the course, despite clear institutional policy that faculty own their course content and are responsible for building it.

And then there were the Zoom consults. One-to-one sessions with me, often follow-ups from the group webinars, where a professor would appear on screen and, in some cases, be in tears within the first three minutes. Not because they were failing. Because they were being asked to replace twenty years of standing in front of a room with a software platform they’d never needed before, and nobody had told them it was okay to feel like it was too much to take on.

I gave them that space. Every time.

By two o’clock most days, I had processed over a hundred emails, with more arriving faster than I could reply. As I was firing off replies, I kept returning to a mental image of the post office on Christmas Eve — a line of people out the door, each one holding a wrapped package needing to be delivered in time for the holiday, and one worker behind the counter moving as fast as humanly possible.

Somewhere around week two of Spring quarter, I realized I needed a smarter answer. Not a faster one... a smarter one.

The problem wasn’t my typing speed. It was the nature of the requests themselves. Every faculty member had built — or was building — their course differently. Teachers have full agency with their course design, which means no two courses look alike. A knowledge base article that says “click Settings, then change the Participation field” assumes the reader can find Settings, knows what the Participation field is, and has the cognitive bandwidth to translate written instructions into action on a screen they’ve never navigated before. In Spring 2020, those were not safe assumptions.

So I tried something different. Steering into the skid, if you will.

Picture a two-minute narrated screencast. A greeting with the recipient’s first name, like how I’d greet them arriving at our table at a coffee shop. Their specific course visible in full screen view. My calm and conversational voice walking them through exactly what to do, in exactly the right order, with exactly the right level of explanation for someone who was not a Canvas expert. When I finished with, “Let me know if you have any follow-up questions. Hang in there with everything. Have a good day.” and stopped recording, the software uploaded it to the web and opened a unique URL in my browser tab. A text snippet populated my reply with the link and a single sentence of context, I pasted that unique link, and hit send.

The whole thing — recording, upload, reply — took three minutes and twenty-five seconds.

I want you to think about that timeframe. Three minutes and twenty-five seconds, start to finish, for a personalized, narrated, step-by-step walkthrough of a specific problem for a specific person in their specific course. Now I want you to compose an email in that same window — write the greeting, explain the steps in text, format it with bullet points, find the web links to relevant knowledge base documentation, spell-check it, grammar-check it, re-read to make sure you didn’t accidentally tell them to click something that doesn’t exist anymore — and tell me you got there in under four minutes.

Go ahead. I’ll wait...

Here’s the part no one saw coming: My disclaimer.

Midway through each screencast, if I chose to make a change to the client’s course on their behalf, I would say something like:

Now, while I never make changes to a professor’s course without prior permission — with your best interests in mind, I’m going to set this up for you based on what you described in your email. Should you want to yell at me for doing something to your course without your permission, do let me know.

That line got laughs. It was supposed to. But it wasn’t just a joke.

After thirty years of working for institutions more interested in covering themselves than trusting their people, I had learned to protect myself too. The disclaimer was my armor. If someone complained up the chain, I needed a documentation trail that showed I’d acted in good faith on their stated request. The humor was a wrapper around something I had genuinely learned the hard way: in an organization that worries about upsetting one customer, you protect your work or nobody else will.

The tragic irony is that the clients never knew that. What they experienced was warmth, humor, and someone who cared enough to record a video just for them.

Make no mistake: management was not the enemy. They showed up the way institutions show up in a crisis — with good intentions and limited usefulness. “Let us know if there’s anything you need.” They meant it. But what I needed was for someone to understand the Canvas platform well enough to actually help, and that person didn’t exist in the organizational chart above me. Additional staff from other departments were brought in to help with shared inbox volume, but they could only handle the simple, low-complexity requests. The complicated ones — the ones that required judgment, contextual knowledge, the ability to read between the lines of an anxious email, and the mental rolodex of knowing their clientele from years of support interactions — those stayed with me.

What I also needed in this arduous season was permission to protect my own mental space. This I had to give myself.

I stopped at my scheduled end time. Every day. Even when the inbox wasn’t empty — and it was never empty. I took my lunch away from my computer, and watched old Tex Avery cartoons and ‘80s MTV rock videos, as a deliberate act of self-preservation. I needed to reflect on happier things, the things I absorbed from the days of my youth. As the uncertain overwhelming days and weeks progressed that spring term, I observed something important. My clients’ emails were being sent at ten or eleven o’clock at night, because that’s when they were working. The asynchronous nature of the screencast format turned out to be a feature, not just a convenience. They could watch when they had the bandwidth for it. I could record when I had the bandwidth for it. Nobody had to find thirty minutes of overlap on a calendar that didn’t exist anymore to meet live-time.

That realization — that I could provide a specific number of live one-to-one consultations and handle the rest through screencasts — was the moment I stopped drowning and started swimming.

After four academic terms, the two inboxes had processed somewhere in the neighborhood of thirteen thousand emails. And I logged many hours in one-to-one conversations with my faculty clients. My colleagues had held hundreds of hours of group training. That rock got successfully pushed up the hill to the top. We had moved two thousand faculty from in-person to online instruction in the time it normally takes to plan a conference.

What management feared most about the screencast approach — the lack of standardization, the impossibility of pointing everyone to the same resource — turned out to be the gleaming evidence. One size doesn’t fit all with Canvas support because no two courses are built the same way. The personalized video wasn’t an inefficiency. It was the only honest answer to what the question actually was.

I still make those narrated screencasts. Six years later, every single one is different, and every single one takes about the same three minutes and twenty-five seconds.

The fifth rave email was not a fluke. It was the methodology, working exactly as intended.

More later...

I can fix most of my clients’ issues in about 14 seconds. Five mouse clicks and the problem is gone. But I almost never do that. Because the fastest resolution isn’t always the best one, and the person sitting across from me didn’t schedule a consultation to watch me show off.

Ten minutes before every consultation, I start preparing. I adjust my browser, check my webcam lighting and background, and set up my client’s account. By the time they arrive, their view is already waiting for them. Not my whole desktop with its files and folders and distractions. Just the browser. Just their view. No bookmarks like “crypto investing” and no open tabs like “Fluffy Blueberry Muffin Recipe.” When they join, I say something like, “Can you see the screen I am sharing okay? I’m more than happy to share my screen so you can sit back and direct traffic. Sort of like a Subway restaurant, where I make the sandwich for you and you watch the process and say ‘More cucumber, less onions.’” That usually gets a chuckle. Then I say, “But if you want to share your screen to show me what you’re seeing, do let me know. Now how may I help you today?”

The Subway line is funny, but it’s doing real work. It tells the client three things before we’ve touched a single setting: you’re in charge, I’m here to serve, and this is going to be a conversation, not a lecture.

From there, I match their pace. If I can tell they want to understand the why behind each step, I keep a running commentary. Every click, every decision, narrated in plain language. If the screen is dense with information and I need a moment to find what I’m looking for, I’ll say out loud, “All right, where is that link? It should be here. I know it’s here somewhere. Ah! There it is.” Maybe I spotted it instantly. Maybe I didn’t. The point is that the client sees even the expert has to look. That dissolves the distance between their experience and mine.

If my client is taking notes, I stop talking. I watch them write. When they look back up at me, I say, “Back when I was in college, I had a tough time with lectures. I’d be writing something important down and miss the next fifteen seconds of what the professor was talking about.” Teachers don’t wait to see if their students absorb the material. I do.

And here is the part that matters most: not every client needs the same version of me. Some clients want the energy, the humor, the Crisco and the Crikey. Others are highly anxious, socially uncomfortable, and would probably rather not be in a live session at all. For those clients, I ratchet down the enthusiasm. I speak quietly. I pay close attention to their comfort level and I never blast through a solution to show how much I know.

I think of it as chameleon consulting. Not changing who I am, but adjusting how I show up based on what the person in front of me needs. The Sherpa doesn’t set the pace. The climber does. The Sherpa’s job is to know the terrain, stay close, and make sure nobody falls.

That’s the difference between a teacher and a Sherpa. A teacher delivers information and expects you to keep up. A Sherpa walks beside you and makes sure you never feel lost. I decided a long time ago which one I wanted to be.

If you ever sat with me for a consultation, I promise you one thing: I would never be Nick Burns, Computer Guy from Saturday Night Live.

More later…

I am not a quitter. I want to make that clear before I say anything else.

I have spent nearly thirty years in higher education technology support. I have had opportunities to leave. Moments where the frustration was loud enough and the alternatives were tempting enough that walking away would have been understandable. I stayed. Not because I didn’t have options, but because I believed in the work, and I wasn’t finished with it.

I’m still not finished with the work. But I am finished with the frame.

The frame is the part that reduces you. It takes a person with thirty years of experience, curiosity, creativity, and genuine care for the people they serve, and flattens them into a resource. An answer-man. A drone directed to stay in your lane, don’t “make waves”, accept the scope creep of adding tasks to your plate when a coworker leaves, be grateful for your cost-of-living increase, and don’t ask for what you’re worth because the budget doesn’t allow it. The frame doesn’t see a human being with feelings. It sees a function.

I know the exact moment I saw the frame clearly. Not the management, not the policies, not any single decision. The whole system. The container that held the work and slowly squeezed the life out of it. It was during COVID.

When the world went remote, something unexpected happened. The management layer that had spent years directing, redirecting, and cautioning my approach to support suddenly had no mechanism to do so. I was alone at home with my computer, responding to a hundred-plus emails a day from frantic clients, and I tried something new: I sent them personalized, narrated video screencasts walking them through their exact situation, in plain language, with my voice guiding them step by step.

The responses floored me. Not “Thanks.” Not a thumbs-up reaction in the email software. Instead I received “Brilliant!” and “This video is amazing!” and “You are outstanding!” and “You are a rock star!” Superlatives I had never received in my earlier years of support. Something personalized, innovative, and made specifically for them. That was what earned the response I had been chasing my entire career. And management had no move to stop me. Thirteen thousand emails processed. Hundreds of one-to-one video consultations. In one calendar year. The university recognized my effort with an award. But that recognition came from the top, not from my direct management. The department’s response? A congratulations posted in a Teams channel after the award was already announced. Reactive praise, not initiated praise. The institution saw the work. The people closest to me on the org chart had to be told it was worth celebrating.

That was the clarity. Not a single moment. A season. A season where the frame dissolved and the work stood on its own. I saw what my practice looked like without the institutional weight pressing down on it. And I couldn’t unsee it.

That season gave me something else too. Hundreds of client email replies worthy of displaying on the refrigerator door. A President’s Award. And a realization, shaped by my wife and by professional counselors who helped me see what my clients had been saying all along: my worth as a professional was never defined by what management thought of me. It was defined by the people I actually served.

I’m not burned out. I want to be clear about that too. If you asked my clients, they would have no idea anything was wrong. They see the person who answers their questions quickly, kindly, and with a sense of humor. They see answer-man. They don’t see the person behind the answers. They don’t see the cost of doing beautiful work inside a frame that never recognized it.

And that’s okay. Because I’m not leaving the work. The work is who I am. The consultations, the relationships, the way I sit with someone and make technology feel manageable instead of threatening. None of that retires. The relational technologist doesn’t disappear when the institution stops signing the paychecks. He just finds a better frame.

I’m done with the frame. Not with the work. There’s a difference, and it changes everything.

More later…