STEVEN LU

I'm Steven Lu. I work in IT support in New York City, currently at Major League Baseball, looking after the laptops, accounts, and assorted mysteries that keep people's workdays running.

I'm quiet by default. I'd rather read the log than talk over someone in a standup, and I do my best thinking with headphones on and a ticket open. That isn't the same as hanging back, though.

When something is genuinely broken, I'm usually the one still there when it isn't.

I got here the ordinary way: an internship at a high school help desk, then a small managed service provider where I was whoever showed up when something went wrong. That job suited me. There often wasn't anyone else to ask, so I learned to sit with a problem until it made sense rather than hand it off.

The work is harder than it looks and most of it goes unnoticed. Done well, nobody has any reason to think about it at all. I still enjoy it. Getting someone out of a problem and back to their day is the part I care about most. A laptop won't boot on the morning of a deadline. A new hire needs to exist in six systems before nine. A conference room decides it has never met the projector, ten minutes before the meeting. It's small, constant, and it matters a great deal to whoever is standing in front of you.

I'm the one who writes things down, partly so I don't solve the same problem twice, mostly so nobody has to come find me to solve it. If you need someone who will quietly take on the thing nobody else has picked up, that is generally me.