If you need someone who can explain the technology in plain terms and then actually solve the problem, that's the whole offer. In large companies the work has a name — digital workspace engineering, making sure the people who work there have tools that work. I've done it for much larger IT organisations. This is the same job at the size of one shop, one practice, one household.
You don't need to understand any of it to hire me. That part is my job.
Two hours on site, a proper look at what you're running, and a written assessment of what's actually at risk. Yours to keep and act on whether or not you hire me — and credited in full against any build you book afterwards.
A versioned backup with a second copy held somewhere the building isn't, proved by restoring from it while you watch. Plus hardware at cost.
Wired where wired makes sense, wireless done properly everywhere else — so the connection holds up when you're busiest.
Fixed prices, quoted before I start. If a job doesn't need either build, I'll tell you that instead.
Sorted by what's actually going wrong, not by what kind of work you do. Find the one that sounds like your week — and if none of them fits, describe yours in whatever words you'd use.
“There's a drive plugged in. I think it's backing up.”
A backup nobody has ever restored from is a belief, not a backup. Two things account for most of it: a drive that quietly stopped copying months ago and never said so, and a synced folder that copies your deletion everywhere within seconds. A contractor's job photos, a bookkeeper's client files, a family's whole run of pictures, a photographer's archive — same test for all of them. Could you get it back, with someone watching.
“It's on the laptop, or the drive, or in an email. One of those.”
Nothing is lost, exactly. It's in email, on the desktop, on a thumb drive, and in a cloud folder somebody set up years ago that nobody has opened since. A bookkeeper mid-quarter, a contractor pricing a job, a household hunting for a tax document — the work isn't finding the file, it's working out which copy to trust. No new app has ever fixed that.
“It's slow. And the wifi goes out most afternoons.”
Slow is a symptom, not a diagnosis — sometimes a full disk, sometimes years of things loading at startup, sometimes a machine that's fine sitting behind wireless that isn't. A café's card reader quitting mid-rush and a therapist's video call freezing mid-session are two different faults wearing the same word. I'd rather spend an evening making what you already own work properly than watch you buy a new machine and inherit the same problem on faster hardware.
“I couldn't tell you what half these charges are for — and the person who set it up has gone.”
Storage on three services, none of them full. An app somebody signed up for once, a plan renewing on a card nobody checks, an account still in a former contractor's name, a password in a notebook by the till. A salon, a small practice, a household with a cupboard full of boxes — same pattern every time, and nobody has ever sat down and added the yearly total up. Untangling it is mostly reading, asking and writing down, not buying.
Twelve years in finance IT, from a New York trading floor to building and running the systems people work on every day. That first job, in 2014, was real-time support on the floor — the person in front of you has no interest in how any of it works, so you fix it, then say what happened in one sentence. That's still the skill. The technology got much larger. The explaining stayed exactly the same size.
None of that makes me better at your problem because it was big. It makes me better because the discipline doesn't change with size. Know what you have. Keep one of each thing. Be able to put it back. That's the whole of it — and it's rarely applied to a two-person office or a family, because the people trained to do it are mostly employed full time by large companies. Your shop doesn't need the machinery I use at work. It deserves the same three habits, and they can be set up in an evening.
Most people don't have a technology problem — they have an accumulation problem: another subscription, another drive, another app, while the original fault sits underneath doing the same job badly. The fix is usually the thing you already own, set up correctly, with one clear place for everything to live.
In whatever words you'd use — you don't need the right ones, that's my job. I'll tell you honestly whether I can help and roughly what it would take. Appointments across North Seattle run weekdays 10–11am and from 2pm, plus weekends, and scheduling is confirmed within two business days.