Author: Mark Alexander

I know I’ve bitched about this countless times over the years, but it bears repeating. 80% of my job consists of doing shit that people should be able to do themselves—if they had the least bit of curiosity in understanding how things work.

What I do isn’t rocket science. So often I hear, “You’re a miracle worker!” No Virginia, I just think logically, and if I can’t find a solution to some obscure problem, I fucking GOOGLE IT.

What I’ve taken to doing lately is documenting how to do pretty much every simple, day-to-day thing that we get requests for and emailing the doc back to the user. It cuts down the amount of time I waste calling people and leaving messages (90% don’t pick up, the listed number on the service ticket is incorrect, or they never return calls). That way, when the inevitable email comes through weeks later asking “Why hasn’t this been addressed? I put this ticket in a month ago!” I can say, “Did you see the email I sent you the day you put in the ticket?”

“Oh, yeah. I didn’t read it.”