The Question Isn't Old — The Person Is New

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...