The Relational Technologist Mindset

There are two versions of the living room in my house. The first is a quiet Saturday morning. Matcha latte to my side, warm and unhurried. A big leafy tree in the front lawn greeting the weekend sunshine through the window. The Windham Hill Guitar Sampler from 1988 playing from a modded 1TB iPod Classic through a TwelveSouth AirFly into a Soundcore Boom bluetooth speaker. Music I have been listening to since I was a teenager expanding my music world by checking out all sorts of records from the town library, so deeply familiar after thirty-plus years that it stopped being just music and became atmosphere. It doesn’t ask anything of me. It simply holds an airy space with pleasant fingerstyle acoustic instrumentals to occupy the silent space. ...

When I was in sixth grade, I discovered I had a gift. Spelling bees. Classroom, grade, school district. First place, three years running. Twice I made it to Seattle for the Washington State spelling bee, standing at a microphone in front of a room full of people, spelling words that look like you grabbed a handful of random Scrabble tiles. My preparation was exhausting. Every evening my mother would drill me on words for an hour. Tens of thousands of reps to train my brain to recite each letter with focus and clarity. But my visualization method was simple and a little strange. When I practiced a difficult word, I would picture it in my mind against a specific background. Yellow. With black letters. I’m not a fan of bees, so I don’t know where the visual came from. I just know it worked. ...

I know what getting fired feels like. Twice. The first time I was thirteen years old, cleaning boats in a boatyard. The second time I was sixteen, working the grill at a family-owned restaurant that ran like a Denny’s. Both times, the reason was the same: poor work performance, and quite frankly, I didn’t do well with bosses’ authority. Both times, I deserved it. I was not a motivated young man. I was a kid doing the minimum, probably less than the minimum, in jobs that felt like obligations rather than opportunities. It was nice to make a little money to buy the newly-released Miami Vice II soundtrack on CD and a few basketball cards at the drugstore, but nobody handed me a philosophy to operate by. Nobody sat me down and explained what it meant to take pride in your work. I was just a teenager collecting a paycheck and doing a bad job of earning it. ...

The email arrived the way they always do; vague, a little anxious, and missing some details I would need to actually help. A teacher unfamiliar with Canvas. A peer review assignment that wasn’t behaving. A reference to the online documentation that, in her words, wasn’t showing her what she needed to see. And a closing “Please help?” that told me more about her frustration level than anything else in the message. ...

When I was a kid, I was the one who finished the spot-the-difference puzzle before anyone else at the table had picked up their pencil. Two nearly identical panels sitting side by side, and somewhere in there a lampshade had lost its stripe, a clock had gained a hand, a bird had quietly vacated a branch. Most people scan both panels and see the same picture twice. I couldn’t not see the difference. The mismatch announced itself. ...

I hear it from tenured faculty with three degrees on the wall. I hear it from PhD researchers who have forgotten more about their field than most people will ever learn. I hear it from adjuncts, staff, and first-year students. I hear it from people who have navigated complex institutions for decades and people who arrived last term. I feel so dumb about this. It crosses every credential boundary without exception. And because it does, I stopped taking it literally a long time ago. ...

There is a uniform. You know the one. Khaki pants. Light blue button-down shirt. Maybe a polo if it’s a casual Friday. It has been the default wardrobe of the male office worker since roughly 1987, and the movie Office Space didn’t invent it so much as immortalize it — Bill Lumbergh in his long-sleeve button-down with a yellow tie, coffee mug in hand, asking about the TPS reports with the affect of a man who stopped feeling things sometime during the Reagan administration. The uniform signals compliance. It communicates nothing else. ...

When I was a fifth grader, I couldn’t understand why some kids weren’t nice to me. I wasn’t the kind of kid who shrugged it off. I genuinely wanted to know the reason. The confusion followed me home, to the dinner table, where I asked the question and received answers that would be fit for a Hallmark card but didn’t fit the situation. So I carried the question with me instead, for years, without a good answer. It was a heavy backpack to lug around, especially during adolescence. ...

Back before Zoom and Teams existed, my work involved in-person tech support. A call from a client meant ten minutes of preparation before I ever touched a keyboard. Not ten minutes of Googling. Ten minutes of walking. I’d hang up the phone, grab my notebook, get a drink of water, maybe use the restroom, and then spend the five-minute walk to their office doing something nobody could see: fixing the problem in my head. Every mouseclick. Every typed command. Every location on the computer desktop I’d need to access. I might not go directly to their office on that walk — I might sit down on a bench or nearby chair to run the whole sequence before I engaged with their computer, because the alternative was arriving unprepared and hearing a voice in my own head say, “You walked all this way and you don’t know how to fix it. Now they think you don’t know what you’re talking about.” ...

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? ...