I Choose to Be the Contradiction

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...