Support Trenches 🐎

The Only Optimism That Actually Works

Sat, 02 May 2026 19:02:02 +0200

I've spent twenty years in the trenches watching two kinds of people argue about the future.

The social and political optimists say: "If we just pass the right laws, fix the culture, and get the right people in charge, everything will finally get better."

The technological optimists say: "Give humans better tools and they'll figure out the rest."

History keeps proving the second group right - and the first group spectacularly wrong.

Look at the pattern. Every decade we get grand promises about how new regulations, new social movements, or new political saviors will solve poverty, inequality, education, or healthcare. The results are usually modest at best, expensive, and sometimes actively harmful. Meanwhile, a few nerds in garages or labs quietly ship a new technology that changes daily life more in five years than ten years of policy ever could.

The smartphone didn't need a government program to connect the world. The internet didn't ask for permission to democratize knowledge. Cheap solar, Starlink, and cloud computing didn't wait for the perfect political moment - they just got built.

In support we see this every single day. We complain about broken processes, terrible CRMs, and endless bureaucracy. Social optimists would try to "fix" it with more meetings, more policies, and more mandatory training. Technological optimists ship a script, a dashboard, or an automation that actually removes the pain. Guess which one actually moves the needle?

The reason is simple: technology scales and compounds. Social and political solutions usually fight against human nature, incentives, and complexity - and they lose.

Humans are messy, selfish, brilliant, and stubborn. No amount of top-down social engineering has ever managed to change that for long. But give the same messy humans better tools - faster computers, better networks, smarter software - and they will route around problems, invent workarounds, and create value in ways no committee could ever predict.

This doesn't mean technology is always good or risk-free. It absolutely isn't. But over the long run, the arrow of technological progress has been the most reliable force for human betterment we've ever had.

So what does this mean for us in the trenches?

It means you should bet on builders, not on saviors. It means you should spend your energy shipping, automating, and improving the actual tools people use instead of waiting for the perfect policy or the perfect culture shift. It means staying technologically optimistic even when the headlines are full of doom - because history shows that the people quietly solving real problems in the background usually win.

The social optimists will keep being disappointed. The technological optimists will keep being proven right, one breakthrough at a time.

Stay on the side that builds. Stay on the side that ships. Stay on the side that actually moves the world forward.

The future belongs to the people who keep making better tools - not to the people who keep promising better intentions.

Ever watched a "perfect" social or political solution fail spectacularly while a simple technological one quietly succeeded? Or felt the quiet hope that comes from betting on human ingenuity instead of human systems? Drop your thoughts below 👇 - the more real, the better. We've all lived through both sides of this story.

The customer everyone (not so) secretly dreaded

Sat, 02 May 2026 17:56:16 +0200

Back when I was still cutting my teeth in support, there was one name that made the whole team groan the moment it appeared in the queue. Every ticket he opened turned into a marathon: in-depth troubleshooting, engineering escalations, and code fixes.

Minor bugs, cosmetic quirks, edge cases - he found them all. And he was… grumpy. Short replies. Zero small talk. The kind of customer who made people quietly negotiate in Slack: "Not it. You take this one.". Luckily, he never filed any of the customer satisfaction surveys, so there was no threat of a bad survey response.

One day a new case landed with me - Friday afternoon. It was complex enough for a WebEx call (the ugly and slow green/greyish load screen that looked like Windows 95). While the screen was still connecting, I tried an icebreaker:
"I’m sitting here in beautiful Ireland right now."
His reply was instant:
"I’m in Berlin. But I don’t see how that solves my problem."
Awkward silence achieved.

We got to work. I gave him a solid workaround on the spot and promised a proper fix. Something shifted. For the first time, he actually warmed up:
"Finally somebody who is willing to resolve this right before the weekend and actually help me."

That sentence hit harder than I expected. Other colleagues had fixed his issues before - with plenty of empathy, I thought. So I took a breath and asked the question nobody had dared to ask before:
“Why do you keep finding so many issues… even the small ones?”
His answer came in a tired voice that still echoes in my head:
“Because I have to.”

Turns out he wasn’t a difficult user. He was an outsourced QA engineer for his company. His literal job was to test our software to destruction before it reached their end customers. Every bug - no matter how tiny - had to be reported, tracked, and either fixed or officially acknowledged by the vendor. He was literally doing our QA work for us… while paying full price for the licenses and support.

I felt like an idiot for all the eye-rolling that had happened before him.
After the call I asked marketing to send him a backpack, sweater, and mousepad - just a small thank-you. Then I set up recurring syncs between him and our product managers. Suddenly the “problem customer” became one of our most valuable (and surprisingly friendly) partners. And for the first time ever, he started to fill our customer survey requests - all fair and positive.

He retired a few years later, but I still think about him whenever someone new complains about a “difficult” customer.
The lesson that stayed with me:
The most annoying customers are often the ones carrying the heaviest invisible load. One extra question can turn frustration into gratitude - and a tireless bug-finder into your strongest ally.

Have you ever discovered that the customer everyone avoided was actually doing the company a massive (unpaid) favor?
I’d love to hear your stories.

About

Sat, 02 May 2026 17:22:14 +0200

Your About page is typically one of the most visited pages on your site, need to be simple with a few key things, such as your name, who are you, how can contact you, a small story, etc.