For the first week of summer, I brought our kids to my parents in Georgia, to the tidal playground of my childhood home. Before we arrived, my dad studied his charts to find the path through “the cut,” a serpentine route we navigated on summer days 20 years ago to get to an uninhabited barrier island south of us.
Riding through marshes on a rising tideMy parents and I wanted the kids to experience that boat ride, and the island at the end.
A beach to ourselves Angel wing Our island Palm tree roots and trunk
Sun bleached palm trunk
Riding in boats through salt marshes
Fallen palm tree on beach
Beach on uninhabited barrier island of Georgia
Marshes from the boat
Big sky, marshes, and a palm tree.
Tree trunk bench
The waters and the islands have changed quite a bit. Barrier islands migrate, and tidal waterways shift. But the ride, and the islands at the end, were as quiet, natural, and beautiful as I remember.
Working from a screened porch on the coast of Georgia.
For the first time in over a year and a half at Automattic, I am taking full advantage of the fact that I can work from anywhere. This summer, my husband and I grappled with how to get our kids from Virginia to Georgia and Florida so they could spend time with their grandparents in each state.
We talked about meeting one set of grandparents halfway, then those grandparents meeting the other grandparents halfway again, then sending the kids home from Florida to Virginia unaccompanied on an airplane.
That would have worked, except that it would have cost us more money than we wanted to spend, and it would have created a lot of driving for the grandparents. Plus, my husband and I wanted the chance to see our parents, but neither of us could justify taking two weeks off to visit everyone, plus another week for our own family vacation in August.
Then one day it hit me. Duh. I can work from anywhere. As long as I have my laptop and wifi, I’m all set. I can be the ultimate mom taxi: drive the kids to the grandparents 7 and 15 hours away and get to hang out with everyone in the evenings when my workday is done
So this morning, I worked from my parents’ screened porch on the coast of Georgia. And as a bonus, I got to use my mom’s laptop to test software on a different operating system and browser configuration than I usually use.
Emily Triplett Lentz and Andrea Badgley. Photo credit Ben Macaskill.
“How should we do the intro? Should Andrea reveal the slide, or do you want to do that when you get up there?” Scott looked to Emily Triplett Lentz, writer for Help Scout’s blog, who would soon take the stage to share their 2016 Customer Support Salary Study with SupConf attendees.
I looked to Emily for her answer as well, and as she spoke, I saw some of the coolest earrings I’ve ever seen. Long golden tear drops, substantial, dangling perfectly, 3 inches of shiny, sleek metal. I reached out to touch one, felt its weight, tipped it to see how smoothly it moved on its hook.
And then realized I had just touched a stranger’s earring. I looked at Emily, horrified. “I’m so sorry! I couldn’t help myself — I don’t know why I just did that!” I looked at Scott, SupConf’s lead organizer. “Oh my god, did I violate our code of conduct?”
He and Emily were laughing hard enough that I felt maybe she’d forgive me. “You’re fine,” she giggled.
The next day, the two of them were chatting in the back of the room. I approached to say hi, and Emily pulled the hair back from one of her ears. “Do you want to touch them?” she asked. We all laughed (and yes, I did want to touch them, and yes, I did touch them).
It wasn’t until a couple of days later, when I struggled to recall the everything from SupConf, that I realized Emily and I made a connection. The connection has nothing to do with support, or with our careers, or with anything substantive from the conference. It has everything to do with goofiness and with breaking down barriers, though, and it is memorable.
This is the magic of getting together in real life. Thanks for letting me touch your earring, Emily. I now follow the Help Scout blog because of this, and will always feel like Emily and I are pals.
Several months ago, Scott Tran of the Support Driven community asked me some questions about an internal mini-conference I had organized for Automattic‘s annual meetup. He was thinking about organizing a conference for support professionals, and he’d never organized a conference before.
I was excited to share what I knew, as little as it was. I had never organized a public conference before, either. We laughed, swapped stories, and signed off of our call smiling and happy.
A couple of weeks later, Scott contacted me with some follow up questions about speaker wrangling, which I answered. And then he asked, “Would you like to help me plan this conference?”
😱
I was out of town at the time, was buried under a lot of work, and had no idea how I would fit planning a conference into my full time job and crammed schedule of M-W swimming, Tu-Th soccer, swim meets, soccer tournaments, groceries, laundry, eating, and plain old family time. I fretted over the decision, knowing my life would be much easier if I said no.
Customer support is a noble profession with a bad reputation. Customer support is the face and voice of a company; support is the human element, the connector. Support professionals are thinkers, problem solvers, communicators, helpers. Yet customer support professionals get little respect. We get glazed eyes and blank looks when we answer the question, “What do you do for a living?” We shy away from explaining our jobs, we hedge, we hide what we do because we shrink from the reaction we’ll get.
And so I said yes. SupConf needed to happen. We needed a place where we could gather, learn from each other, teach each other, and figure out how to blaze the path of support as a career. If I could help bring it into the world, I wanted to contribute in any way I could.
Scott had a clear vision of what he wanted the conference to look like. It would be small, to encourage engagement and discussion among attendees. The talks would be professional and would have clear, actionable takeaways for attendees. The conference would be more than speakers talking at an audience. It would capitalize on the unique feature of a conference: that people from around the world gather in a physical space in person. Scott wanted to take advantage of that and get people talking to each other.
Other organizers started joining, and as a group, we found a space, we put out calls for speakers and sponsors. We started thinking about how to realize the SupConf dreams. We organized the program into themes and instituted a talk development program where each speaker had a mentor. We selected speakers blind, with no knowledge of their names, companies, or speaking experience.
Each talk would have followup questions on the screen after the speaker exited the stage so small discussion groups could form. We had breakout sessions after each theme where attendees could talk to the speakers. And instead of an after party, we hosted a dinner the first night where each table was seeded with topics and question cards related to problems support teams are looking to solve.
Table topics and schedule
We were doing all kinds of things differently, and we had no idea how it would land. Would people talk to each other? Would they vote on table topics? Would they actually turn to their neighbors to discuss the the follow up questions? Would they visit the speakers in the breakouts and have more in depth conversations? Would it be okay that there was no booze? A small number of attendees? No afterparty?
The answer to all of those, to our very great delight, was yes. Not only did attendees turn to their neighbors to discuss the questions, they turned their chairs to form dozens of small circles. There was no awkward silence. Instead, we felt we were often pulling folks out of deep discussions in order to keep the program moving.
In other words, our dreams for SupConf were realized. As with all things, it can be improved, and we are looking forward to the feedback we will get from attendees. For a first time event, and for never having helped organize a real conference before, I will go out on a limb and say it was a success.
I am still absorbing the experience. I am so proud, and so honored to have been involved in the very first SupConf. It will take me a while to process the actual content that speakers and attendees shared with us, but fortunately recap posts are already up:
Thank you to the attendees, who made SupConf the amazing event that it was. And thank you to these folks for making it such a pleasure to bring SupConf into the world:
SupConf organizers: myself, Nykki Yeager, Bill Bounds, Diana Potter, Scott Tran, Andrew Spittle, Mercer Smith-Looper
My mentee group: Nykki, Jeremey, me, Mireille, Bill
I love stone steps, especially when they climb through the woods to a waterfall. Along with lighthouse stairs, the curving stairs on the hike to the Cascades near Blacksburg, Virginia, are among my favorite stairways.
Stone stairway on hike to Cascades waterfall in Giles County, VirginiaThey are made with stone from the mountain. They are mossy and organic. They look like they belong.
These stone steps are man-made, in harmony with nature. Instead of making humankind feel other, pitting our species against the rest of the natural world, the stairs make me feel included. They make me feel like we belong.
For the month of April, I resolved to publish a blog post each day. This is the final Aprildaily post of 2016, and is in response to the Daily Post one-word prompt, Stairway.
From the street, everything about our landscape was blocky. When we moved in, the front of our house was all straight lines and rectangles: driveway perpendicular to the street, stairs perpendicular to the driveway, flower beds parallel to the house. Right angles, hard lines.
When we lived in Maryland, we rented a small house that felt welcoming to every person who visited. A picket fence curved around the corner of the lot instead of meeting at right angles, and the path from the gate to the front door formed a graceful, elongated S. Nestled against the fence were the mounds of rounded flower beds.
On the inside, large floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the gentle curves of the garden. A raised brick hearth filled one corner of the living room: a foundation for the wood-burning stove. The pot-bellied stove and its hearthstone softened what would have otherwise been a sharp corner in the room.
All those curves made a difference. I am convinced they are what made the house feel so welcoming. They directed the eye, and the feet, to move along a pleasing path, without hard stops or starts. In our home now, I keep looking to see where we can add soft edges, where we can add graceful curves.
Out front, we can’t build an S walk to the front door since the door is on the second level, but we can add rounded flower beds. Already, with the first bed laid, the house feels more organic. The curved lines relax it.
In our living room, though, we have work to do. Rectangular windows, fireplace, bookshelves, rug; blocky, square furniture; hard slats of wooden blinds. We need some softeners in here. Circles, ovals, or something organic.
Looks like I have a new weekend project.
For the month of April, I will publish a 10-minute free write each day. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. This one is from the Daily Post one-word prompt, Curve.
Butterfly Mind 