One Is an Anomaly

The rule of three is a writing technique in storytelling, speeches, and advertising. Evidently groups of three are effective for people to memorize, and it has a certain rhythmic flow to it. I developed my own rule of three in my tech work.

One is an anomaly. Two is a curiosity. Three is a trend.

The first time something unusual arrives in my inbox, I raise an eyebrow and internally say, “hmmmm...” The second time a similar report comes in, my internal radar activates. The third time, I come out guns blazing. Tech support with pew-pew-pew sound effects.

My nervous system is wired to know the difference between a coincidence and an alarm. Three decades of alarms going off programmed my wiring this way.

Last year, a teacher emailed me about their gradebook. A block of seven to ten students had no scores showing for an automatically-graded quiz, even though the quiz had been completed. That’s unusual. I looked at it, confirmed what they were seeing, and started poking around the course doing some troubleshooting.

Then a second teacher emailed me about the same thing. Different course, different students, similar block of missing scores. Ba-doop. The radar activated in my mind.

Then a third teacher.

I didn’t wait for the fourth. I contacted Instructure Tier II support, the administrative escalation channel, sort of like a red phone hotline for Canvas Admins to speak with the mothership. I reported what I was seeing across multiple courses. The Tier II team confirmed other institutions had reported similar issues. Their engineers were working on it.

I briefed my supervisor chain. Got permission to post a global Canvas announcement to all teachers: here is what is happening, here is what the symptoms look like, and Instructure engineers are working on it. Two hours after the first email arrived in my inbox, Instructure’s online status page flipped from investigating to resolved.

Two hours. From first signal to institution-wide communication to vendor resolution. Because I was counting.

Here is what those two hours actually feel like from the inside, because it doesn’t show on my exterior.

There is a small, brief satisfaction in being on my game in spotting the pattern before the status page alerts show up, before management hears about it through the grapevine, before the inbox fills with confused and frustrated teachers. That satisfaction lasts about thirty seconds. Then the dread arrives.

When a Canvas glitch touches hundreds of gradebooks at my university simultaneously, my clients don’t think “Instructure’s engineers pushed a bad update overnight and it will be taken care of in a while.” They think “something is wrong with my course” and they contact the person whose name they know. That’s me. My name is in bold neon letters on the door. The expectation embedded in every support relationship is that the platform works flawlessly. When it doesn’t, the frustration lands on the person responsible for supporting it.

I didn’t write the code. I didn’t push the update. But I answer for it anyway.

So the satisfaction of spotting the trend gets immediately replaced by the calculus of what’s coming: seven teachers emailing in the first hour, each one describing the same symptoms in different words, some terse, some elaborate, all of them radiating low-level alarm. Management emailing simultaneously on a separate channel: “I’ve heard from some that there is something wrong with Canvas. What’s the status?” They need a full briefing, enough information to eliminate the need for follow-up questions, enough context to answer those contacting them. That’s a second communication job running in parallel while the first one is still active.

Picture a large shiny silver griddle in a busy restaurant kitchen. Pancakes. Bacon. Sausage links. Scrambled eggs. Every item on the griddle has a different cook time, a different heat requirement, a different consequence for inattention. The bacon burns faster than the eggs. The sausage links need to be rolled, not flipped. And the pancakes need exactly the right moment or they come off raw in the middle.

Now imagine you’re the only person at the stove. And it’s Saturday morning around 10 am, and there’s a lot of tables with families wanting their breakfast.

That’s what the three-is-a-trend moment feels like in real time. It’s not heroic like Captain America holding onto a building and a helicopter to prevent it from escaping in The Avengers. It’s not even like Neo stopping a machine gun clip of bullets in The Matrix. Just a lot of items on a hot griddle that need attention all at once, and the understanding that if one thing burns, everyone notices.

I describe my observations of uh-oh issues as Trendspotting, a nod to the famous movie from 1996, Trainspotting. I’m not doing what the characters in that film do. Instead I have an instinct of noticing, cataloging, and connecting dots before anyone else. I find gradebook anomalies at a university in Bellingham, Washington, and I take action. Considerably less cinematic, but the pattern recognition is the same.

One is an anomaly. Two is a curiosity. Three is a trend, and I’m already in motion.

The best part is the pancakes didn’t burn. That’s the mission.

More later...