The Relational Technologist Mindset

A dollar a minute. That’s where I started in 2011. I landed on it mostly because the math was easy and I needed a number, any number, to put on that first invoice to Client #1. I wasn’t thinking about my competition and what they were charging, I was thinking about not embarrassing myself on the first try. That starting rate held for a while. Then my freelance work started expanding, and the pricing expanded right along with it. ...

I was nervous walking into that stranger’s home office. It was after my day job ended, no moonlighting on university time, and I was about to invoice an actual human being for my expertise for the first time in my life. I didn’t know what to charge. I landed on a dollar a minute, which worked out to sixty dollars an hour, mostly because the math was easy and I needed to start somewhere. The full evolution of figuring out what I was, and presently am, actually worth is its own story for another day. ...

In 2011, after fifteen years as a professional technologist at Western Washington University, I’d gotten pretty good at my job providing desktop support to a couple hundred clients spread across numerous departments. I established a solid rapport with many of my clients way before I developed the concept of being a “relational technologist.” I was just an earnest, funny, eager to help young man who wasn’t arrogant or snooty about how I shared my expertise with tech. The rapport I established had many clients viewing me as their go-to guy, saying hi to me outside of work on evenings and weekends. All from recognizing a face that had helped them in a kind way. ...

Nobody is born a monk. The hooded robe and the Gregorian chant come later in life, not the beginning. There’s a person who lived a life in the world the monk eventually walks away from. There are decades of wanting things, chasing things, believing things would solve problems that things were never built to solve. The vow of simplicity isn’t a starting point. It’s an arrival, and it takes a long road to get there. ...

Two or three times a year, an email arrives that takes over my workday. A faculty member has suspicions about a student’s quiz performance. The language is careful but the meaning is clear: they think the student cheated. They want evidence. They want their Canvas administrator to arm them with the data that confirms what they already believe, so they can walk into the Provost’s office with a bulletpoint argument that says the Canvas admin said so. ...

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. ...

I am an Enneagram 1. The improver. The optimizer. The person who cannot be in the vicinity of a system not running at its best without having a compulsion to fix it. This is an excellent trait for a technology consigliere. It is a less welcome trait at home, for my wife’s iPhone. She often has to assure me it is working just fine and does not require reorganization, optimization, or an unsolicited audit. I must confess she’s had to tell me this more than once. My wiring doesn’t always distinguish between a client’s Canvas course and a spouse’s home screen, and it has taken diligent work to unleash the optimizer only when invited. ...

Most people enter into a technology support interaction carrying luggage. Not the good kind with roller wheels and telescoping handles. The kind of luggage acquired from years of being put on hold, of being read to from a script, having their problem recited back verbatim as though parroting the problem was a substitute for resolution, and then having the ticket closed before anything actually worked. This sort of luggage makes a person’s neck muscles tense the moment they have to contact IT for anything. ...

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?” ...

Watch any lively conversation and you’ll see it happen within minutes. Someone is four words from finishing their thought and the person across from them is already talking. Not responding. Talking. The talking sock gets grabbed before the speaker is done, and nobody seems to notice, or care, because everybody in the conversation is waiting for their turn rather than listening for what comes next. My parents drilled the opposite into me when I was a little shaver. You don’t interrupt, young man. You wait. You let the person finish. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a family standard enforced with consequences that eventually morphed into a big part of my character. Or a character flaw to some. ...