I got bored easily.
That wasn't always a good thing.
Teachers called it a problem. Managers sometimes called it impatience. Looking back, I think it was simply the way my mind worked.
If I had to do the same task over and over, eventually I stopped thinking about the task itself and started thinking about the process behind it.
Why was I doing this manually?
Why wasn't the computer doing it?
From the time I first learned BASIC as a teenager, I never really viewed computers as calculators or toys. To me, their entire purpose was automation.
If a human had to perform the same task a thousand times, there had to be a better way.
That mindset followed me into my career.
One of the first opportunities came when the company decided to change DNS servers. Today most people wouldn't think much about that. Back then it was a significant change, and we knew it would generate a flood of support calls from customers who would suddenly find things weren't working correctly.
Most people were preparing to answer the calls.
I was trying to prevent them.
I researched auto-dialer software and built a database of customer information. The idea was simple. Call customers before the change, explain what was happening, and provide the new settings they would need.
The software looked perfect.
The hardware did not.
For hours I chased settings, drivers, and configuration options. Everything appeared correct. The modem would dial data connections but refused to play audio messages.
Eventually my boss and I figured it out. The modem installed in the machine wasn't voice-capable.
What surprised me wasn't that we found the problem.
What surprised me was that he believed me.
Instead of telling me to drop the project, he grabbed the company credit card and took me to a local computer store. We bought a voice modem, returned to the office, installed it, and fired up the software again.
This time it worked.
The modem dialed.
A customer answered.
The recorded message played.
Then it dialed the next customer.
And the next.
And the next.
I remember sitting there watching a computer perform a task that would have taken people days to do manually.
To me, that was exactly what computers were supposed to do.
A few years later another opportunity appeared.
At the time I was one of three people responsible for assigning static IP addresses to business customers. Every customer who needed servers, VPNs, firewalls, or advanced services depended on those addresses.
There was only one problem.
The Internet was beginning to run out of IPv4 addresses.
Every address we assigned disappeared from the available pool. When customers disconnected service, there wasn't a reliable process for making those addresses available again.
Everyone was worried about running out.
I started wondering how many we had already lost.
The answer wasn't in one system.
It never is.
One database held customer information. Another contained network information. Somewhere between them was the answer.
So I built scripts.
One generated a list of addresses that might no longer be in use.
Another checked whether they were still responding.
Another produced reports.
The final process returned unused addresses back into inventory.
For about a week I let the process run.
When it was finished, we had recovered an astonishing number of static IP addresses.
The scripts didn't create a single new address.
They simply found the ones we had forgotten about.
Nobody handed me an award.
There wasn't a ceremony.
But people noticed.
The conversations about shortages grew quieter. New customers kept being provisioned. The pressure eased.
Somewhere along the way I began realizing that a few simple scripts could affect far more people than the handful sitting around me.
Not all of my automation projects were quite so noble.
One Valentine's Day I ordered flowers for my wife through an online florist.
They never arrived.
I called customer service.
I emailed.
I waited.
Nothing happened.
Eventually I stopped trying to figure out how to contact the company and started trying to understand how the company worked.
Those are two very different things.
I researched names.
I found executives.
I discovered email address formats.
I learned more about the organization than any customer probably should have.
Then I did what had become my natural response to almost every problem.
I automated it.
I created a script that periodically sent polite requests asking someone to explain what had happened and refund the order.
I wasn't trying to be malicious.
I wasn't even particularly concerned about the money.
By then I simply wanted someone to acknowledge that there was a problem.
Eventually they did.
I received a full refund.
A short time later, the company's vice president personally called me and apologized.
Looking back, the flowers were almost irrelevant.
What mattered was understanding why something had failed and refusing to let the mystery go.
That trait followed me throughout my career.
Whether it was a modem, an IP address, a broken process, or a customer complaint, I always found myself asking the same question.
Why doesn't this work?
And once I started asking that question, I rarely stopped until I found the answer.