What Every Client Deserves, Part 6 — Being Remembered

People can only know what they’ve been given.

I’m a private person outside of my work and my public hobbies. The inner workings of me aren’t on display by default. I don’t have bobbleheads or other posters of sports teams in my Zoom/Teams background, nor do I wear attire with labels or companies. So when someone I know from a social setting sees me and asks if I’m still playing softball, which was a hobby from two decades ago, I don’t take it as a slight. That’s what’s in their mental rolodex. Softball. Brown hair. A younger version of me diving for a blooper in left field on a Friday evening. I smile and tell them that was a fun season of my life, but my body now can’t survive what I used to put it through on the field. We laugh. Small talk ensues.

Or someone who knows me from seeing me on stage at church will ask if I’m still playing bass. And I’ll tell them yes, about one Sunday a month, I always enjoy that opportunity. And then I’ll ask what’s keeping them busy nowadays, an open-ended question designed to avoid the “fine” response, and we’re off and running with another relational technology interaction.

But here’s what I notice: most people stop at what they were given. They file away the one thing and that’s their index card about me. Softball. Bass guitar. Computer guy. We’re all carrying thousands of cards of the people in our lives and the filing system in our brains has limits. But stopping at the first entry means the relationship stays exactly as thin as the day it started, no matter how many years pass.

I can’t seem to stop at the first entry.

In social settings I ask the follow-up. In professional settings I do something that probably has a clinical name but I’ve never looked it up: I keep a mental rolodex on my clients. Not the technical stuff that lives in the ticket history. Other stuff. The sabbatical they mentioned in passing in a previous consult. The peer review assignment they’d never set up before and were clearly unsure about. The comment dropped mid-consultation about a difficult semester with academic integrity issues that was weighing on them while we were fixing their gradebook.

I file it in my mind. And I carry it.

This makes me something adjacent to an unlicensed quasi-counselor, which is not a credential that appears on my email signature but is an accurate description of what happens in the course of sustained technical support work. When you sit with someone repeatedly in moments of low-grade crisis, when their technology isn’t working and the stakes feel higher than they probably are and they’re talking while you’re troubleshooting, they tell you things. Not always intentionally. Often just as the pressure valve releases while the problem gets fixed. And you learn interesting things about people that way, if you’re paying attention.

I’m always paying attention.

So when my calendar shows a consultation with a client I’ve worked with before, my mind does a quick recall. Not of the ticket history, of the person. What do I know about them beyond their Canvas issue? What did they mention last time that I tucked away?

The client enters the video meeting. I greet them, ask how their week is progressing, and then I stop things.

“First things first, how did your sabbatical go? Didn’t you take fall term off?”

There’s a pause. I can see it on their face even through the small rectangle of a video window. They’re asking themselves a question: did I tell Chris about that?

They did. In passing. Last academic year, maybe, mentioned almost as an aside while we were proactively optimizing announcement publish dates. It wasn’t a significant disclosure on the conversational marquee or something they’d expect a tech to retain.

“Thanks for asking. It was great.”

And then they tell me about it. I listen without interrupting, ceding the floor completely, supportive and encouraging and genuinely interested. A minute or two of their recap. Some time away from teaching, whatever it gave them. And then I ease us back toward the reason for the meeting.

“That sounds like a really recharging experience. I’m living vicariously through you! All right, let’s talk about your Canvas courses. I see in the calendar invite you wanted to discuss your gradebook settings.”

Or I’ll remember that our last consultation covered peer review assignments, something they’d never configured before, and I’ll open with: “I remember from our previous visit that we talked through peer review assignments. How has that been working for you?” And the answer tells me whether the learning held, whether there are follow-up questions they didn’t know to ask yet, whether the guidance I tried to offer last time actually landed.

The pause is the thing I think about most. That half-second where the client asks themselves whether they told me. Because what that pause is really saying is: I didn’t expect you to remember.

And the fact that they didn’t expect it tells me everything about how rare it is.

Being remembered is a decision to treat the incidental details of someone’s life as worth keeping. It’s an acknowledgment that the consultation doesn’t end when the screen share closes. It’s an understanding that a client isn’t a ticket with a face attached. They’re a person coming off a sabbatical, or having a difficult semester, or nervous about a peer review assignment they’d never configured before, and they mentioned those things to you, and you were there actively listening with genuine interest.

The mental rolodex only holds what gets filed in it.

File more.

More later...