Every time I say something like, "My first time going to [some place in the US]," I think of my dad, who has never had a passport, and has never been outside North America. He has travelled to Canada, once in his 20s, all the way to the other side of Niagra Falls for his "I went outside the US."

He often says, "Why would I leave the States when there is so much in this country that I haven't seen yet?"

Except he hasn't even tried to see even that.

Related and unrelated, hell, Canada is a damn big country, too.

Also related and unrelated, writing on a tiny screen is irritatingly difficult.

Watching new people start working in technical support positions, especially when they are not in "classic" support roles, is a difficult experience. I can see their frustrations with people asking the same questions just answered. I can see the increased amount of documentation "to solve all the problems." I can see the exasperation oozing out of the screen from the new support people.

I want to give each them a (totally professional) hug and tell them,

Look, people asking for help are not going to read the pinned messages in that support channel. They are not going to search the archives or the help channels for their question. They most likely won't try to figure out the problem at all before they ask for help. They will not read the documentation.

People will show up with a "doesn't work" message. They will ask the same question you just answered last month, last week, yesterday. They will not know what version they were using, or if they are logged in, or what steps they took to be in this werid space, asking for help.

They will be in a hurry. They will want an answer now. They may not be kind.

This is not about you. You are not the technical problem.

Listen to their problem. Ask more questions to understand the root of their help request. Confirm you understand the problem correctly by repeating back to them your understanding of their problem. If they say no, that isn't what is wrong, start over and listen to them. When you understand the problem, then, and only then, help.

Go head and copy and repeat the answer you gave yesterday, last week. Link to the answer in the documentation. Give them the easy answers. Keep your tone light. Add lots of happy emojis.

If you cannot solve their problem, be clear about when someone will follow up with the solution, and actually find someone to solve their problem.
If the problem cannot be solved, be clear about the insolvability of the problem, and let them know that, yes, it does indeed suck.
If you solved the problem, thank them for bringing the issue up. Repeated requests for the same issue indicates a problem with the product or process and THAT is what needs to be fixed.

What won't work is posting "LOOK OVER HERE!" messages to documentation that is 10 pages long, tiny font, on a wiki that no one can access. Neither will posting "SEARCH FOR YOUR PROBLEM BEFORE ASKING" messages. Nor will a dozen pinned messages. People want help, they want to be unblocked.

Find some level of serenity that this is how people are, and have been since forever. Your posts with capital letters are not going to change that behavior. Tolerate the repetitive questions, and take A LOT of joy when someone arrives with a new question, a new problem to solve, a puzzle to figure out.

And maybe take some solace in Marcus' thoughts from 1900 years ago:

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”

One evening when Jonathan and I were in Modena this past March, we were lying in bed talking about us. One of us brought up Instagram, and I told Jonathan, "I understand why you aren't following me on Instagram. I understand spite as a human motivator." Because I did and do. We have hurt each other, and used Instagram as a weapon towards each other. Many times. My account was, at that point in time, following Jonathan's accounts.

Good lord, one should never underestimate spite as a human motivator. So many things have happened because of spite, a "petty ill will or hatred with the disposition to irritate, annoy, or thwart." Spite is often a reaction to being hurt, a response without much thought. It can be a lingering response, or something that is learned by the body and stays for a very long time. Hell, there's an entire book written on it, including some of the upsides of spite. It helps you get things done, helps you move farther and faster than you would without that petty illwill pushing you along, for example.

So, I understood why Jonathan wasn't following me on Instagram, even though he follows his other exes there. What I wasn't expecting in that moment was for him to become angry and force unfollow my account from his. At the time, I thought he had misheard me, that he thought I had unfollowed before out of spite, my spite for him, when I had not unfollowed out of spite. In that moment, I could not figure out how to understand why he had just forced an unfollow for my account. Even now, I still don't know what happened or the why of it.

I have watched Jonathan respond out of spite on a few other things over the subsequent four months. I understand why he did these acts. I understand the power of spite in that moment. I understand how empty one can feel after those actions. I am accepting the fallout of what he has done for those actions that scatter ashes in my world.

Tonight, I was in a similar position where I was angry at the whole situation I was in, and started to respond with spite. I spent an hour working on a project change that was motivated purely out of spite.

And then I stopped.

Who was this helping? No one. Not even me.
Who was this hurting? At least one person that I knew about.
Was this who I wanted to be? Oh fuck no.

Grief works in strange ways. It can surface as spite. Tonight, it did.

I messaged four friends with a simple, "Call me." message, and walked away from my screen. Ten minutes later, one of the friends called, and we talked about our days. Food. Work. Hiking. Exercise. Stocks. Houses. Living areas. Travel. It was a lovely meandering conversation about nothing, a Seinfeld episode in my kitchen.

Victor Frankl wrote, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

I have disagreed with that quote many times, especially when there isn't time between stimulus and response. I've been living a very long time with no space between.

I am happy of myself that tonight, tonight, I found that space, and chose a better response. I can understand spite as a human motivator, and sometimes choose not to let it be mine.

Last night, just before I plugged in my phone and left it in the kitchen on the way to bed, I wrote a note to myself. I left the Notes app open on my phone, so that when I unlocked my phone this morning, the note to myself would be the first thing I saw:

A message to me, from my past self. My past self had faith in now-me that today was the day.

And today was, indeed, the day.

Go me.

I learned to snowboard with Guy way back in the late 1990s. I can actually say last century, I guess. I had tried snowboarding previously, but nothing really stuck until I bought skater / rollerblading kneepads, shoved a towel down the back of my pants to protect my tailbone, and started following Guy down the slopes. He picked out my snowboard and boots. I picked out my jacket (yellow) and sunglasses (shock, also yellow).

When going through a box I had not opened in a while, one containing the remnants of that part of my life, I came across my yellow sunglasses. They cracked me up. I still adore them, but I was unsure how much sun protection they provide. I put them in the donation / free stuff pile to give away.

Today I was listing items in the box on the porch, and pulled out the sunglasses. Wondering if they had UVA/B protection lenses, I searched for them online.

Turns out, Arnette Hoodoo sunglasses are now... vintage. And actually worth some money as vintage. Unsure about the yellow ones, though.

I didn't donate them.