What Every Client Deserves, Part 3 — Being Known
The email arrived with no course name, no section number, no identifying information of any kind. Just a faculty member’s expectation that I would somehow know which of the thousands of Canvas courses in our system they were referring to based on a description that would have challenged a psychic.
I replied professionally. “I’m having a tough time locating your course. Would you please provide me with some specific information about it so I can troubleshoot on your behalf?”
The reply was more of the same. Cryptic. Informal. Opaque.
I replied again. “I still don’t know what course you are referring to.”
The tone in their emails was escalating toward adversarial. They wanted me to assume I knew what was inside their head. This was the early days of my journey as a relational technologist. I was kind and empathetic and conversational, but I required specifics. Neither of us was getting what we needed, and then a one-sentence reply arrived in all caps that I won’t reproduce here, so I made a decision.
I immediately replied in the eighth email of the thread that I was coming over to their office. In person. In ten minutes.
I grabbed my notebook portfolio, slammed the door to my office, and started walking.
It’s a quarter-mile walk across campus to their office. The large technologist in mostly black, taking up more sidewalk than strictly necessary, with a visual expression on his face so angry it made young undergrad students part ways, was having a very loud internal conversation with himself that nobody else could hear. The frustration basketball was fully inflated and I was holding it underwater with both hands, determined not to let it launch up and splash everyone in the vicinity.
The mantra started somewhere around the halfway point.
You will not get upset. You will maintain patience. You will not let things escalate. You will not win a pissing match with a tenured professor.
Over and over. Loud enough inside my head to drown out the part of me that wanted to walk in and explain, calmly and professionally, exactly how a person should communicate with a Canvas administrator when they need assistance. Which would have been the end of any possibility of a functional relationship and the beginning of a very uncomfortable conversation with my supervisor. And my supervisor’s supervisor.
So I overrode it. And somewhere in the last hundred yards, the mantra shifted from a restraint into an intention. Don’t escalate. Learn their way.
I darkened their door, filling up nearly the entire frame. They looked up from a book they were reading at their desk. I smiled and said, “Good afternoon [first name.] Please show me the course you are referring to?”
The hyperfocus activated the moment I looked over their shoulder at the screen. I learned they were using their own informal course name, not the official title in the system. The one I see in Canvas when I search for courses. Keywords I hadn’t seen in any support request before. I filed that in my mind immediately. Then they started describing what they needed. The vocabulary was entirely their own. Roll over instead of import content. Add into instead of cross-list. A private language built up over years of using Canvas the way they understood it rather than the way the documentation described it.
Most people would have corrected the terminology. I made mental notes.
The course issue got resolved. But the more important thing that happened in that office was the construction of a translation subroutine I’ve been running ever since. A unique support method for one client. Their informal title keywords map to the official course name. Their verb choices map to standard Canvas functions. What looks like opacity in an email is actually a consistent internal logic once you have the decoder.
I built the decoder that afternoon. I’ve been updating it ever since.
Subsequent emails from this professor arrived with the usual unconventional diction and I met them where they were. Not my standard brief, professional, just-the-facts response. Conversational. Reassuring. Sideways smileys. :-) Their claws retracted gradually. The tone warmed. A couple more in-person consults brought more familiarity with my particular Sam the Eagle energy and their particular Janice from Electric Mayhem energy, and something that started as friction began to function.
Then one afternoon an email arrived. Subject line in all caps. Urgent. A non-standard course descriptor I wouldn’t have recognized two years earlier. Graded curriculum got deleted by accident. The kind of message that would have sent me down three wrong paths before my translation subroutine existed.
I keyed in on their code words. I quickly located the right course in their dashboard. I restored the deleted quiz and the student scores popped back into the gradebook. I replied: “How are we lookin’? :-)” with a clickable link to their gradebook.
The response came back in all caps.
“YOU ARE A GODSEND.”
I smiled at my screen for a moment longer than I usually allow myself. And then I left my office to go for a quick walk to my happy place on the university campus. A location where you can view the city and the bay. I reflected on where things were with that client and where things are now. I turned an adversary into an ally because I tried to get to know them.
Months later, something happened that I couldn’t have predicted. This faculty member nominated me for a university President’s Exceptional Effort Award. Official recognition. My name on a list of people who had done something worth acknowledging, submitted by someone who two years earlier had been sending me adversarial all-caps demands and expecting me to read their mind across the campus network.
Being known isn’t where relationships start. It’s where they arrive after enough time, enough contact, enough deliberate attention to how a specific person moves through the world. It doesn’t begin with warmth. It begins with friction and opacity and a quarter-mile walk and a mantra you repeat until it becomes an intention.
The pivot isn’t the award. The pivot isn’t “YOU ARE A GODSEND.” The pivot is the moment on the sidewalk when you stop rehearsing what you want to say and start asking yourself what you need to learn.
Being seen takes ninety seconds. Being heard takes a conversation. Being known takes as long as it takes, and it starts with the decision to learn someone’s language instead of correcting theirs.
More later...