TBH another thing that irritates the living shit out of me is how many ADHD tools and guides are inaccessibly expensive.

I searched for ADHD organizational videos today and of the seven I opened up, three were ads (one for something QUITE expensive and unfortunately very useful-looking) and the other four were unbearably rigid in their approach to how to help with organization (“the only way to stay organized is to always put things where they belong immediately and never deviate from that” - you sound like my old GP when I introduced him to the concept of delayed sleep phase disorder. No there isn’t only one solution, and no a solution that is going to require a high amount of effort for no visible reward forever isn’t going to work).

I get that creators with ADHD have to make a living, and being an ADHDinfluencer is probably one of the better gigs someone with ADHD could land. But also.

Like?

Fuck you a little bit? Like at least a little bit. You’re making sponcon about expensive tools for people who are like 20% less likely to be able to hold a full time job than a neurotypical.

Which is exactly why my website is free and it and all of my resources will always be 100% free.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: my mom and I had discussed end-of-life planning and pre-death fill-in-the-blanks tools for years before she died, but I never had the money to go out and order the books about it when I was talking to her about it. That’s why I made the death book, and that’s why the death book will always and forever cost zero dollars.

Same thing here. I’ve been searching for good ADHD tools for most of a decade and what I get on free sites is mostly a lot of inspiration porn, tools for neurotypical parents to manage their ADHD children, and ADHD adults feeling helpless. And when I wanted to read the book about managing your ADHD that everybody praised, it was thirty bucks that I didn’t have and an 18-month waiting list at my library.

So I want to make sure that other people who feel like they’re drowning have something to grab onto that I wish I’d had when I was there. You don’t have thirty bucks or eighteen months to wait either, you need to figure out how to keep track of your important papers NOW because you’re coping with a loss or a separation or a natural disaster.

(Though if I haven’t written it yet you may be waiting 18 months sorry it’s getting built but it’s not moving fast)

I had a delightful ADHD moment the other day. I went to the doctor to talk about meds and got asked if I had my insurance card at the counter. I said no, but none of my details had changed and they said that was fine. Then I signed in and paused for a second.

“Actually I don’t have my insurance card because I’m pretty sure I forgot it here on October 8th. Do you guys possibly have it?”

The intake lady gave me kind of a weird look and opened my chart, then laughed and handed me my insurance card.

Great to have that back! Would have been very handy a couple times in the last few months.

One of the problems that came up this week is actually a problem that came up in December.

On December 15th we got a warning about disk health in a server; there is a drive that is at risk of failure.

A ticket was created for me to create a quote to replace the drive.

There was no part number associated with the ticket, and because of the type of server, there was no easy way to access configuration information online and our hardware documentation is a disaster (I have thought it was a disaster since the acquisition; I set up hardware documentation at the old job specifically to avoid issues like this and now all that documentation is gone because we didn’t keep any licenses of the old job’s CRM). This was not a situation where I could find a part number.

I contacted Tech Alice and asked her to check the part number on the server. Alice reported back that because the drive was part of a RAID array, she couldn’t get the part number. She recommended asking Bob, and put her time entry on the ticket.

I contacted Tech Bob and asked him if he could find the part number for the drive on the server; Bob also reported back that he could not find a way to get the part number from the server, he recommended that Charlie collect the part number when he went onsite. Bob added his time to the ticket (still my ticket) and added the status “onsite needed.”

Now it is December 23rd. I have messaged Charlie and asked him to check the part number when he is onsite and have added him to the ticket. I’m out of the office today, Charlie is out of the office next week. Charlie does not remember to look at the part number when he is onsite. It is the end of the year.

Now it is January 15th. We lost the first week of the year to assessments, and the second week of the year to the state and our clients being on fire - people were unable to go onsite because of all of that. Charlie is going onsite. I remind him to get the part number when he is at the client site. When he is at the client site he alerts me that actually he is at their other location, not the location with the server.

Now it is January 27th. Charlie is going back onsite, he is on my ticket, the ticket is set to onsite needed. I remind Charlie that we need the part number. Charlie does not remember.

Now it is February 6th. We have created a whole new ticket for Charlie with the *EXPRESS STATED PURPOSE* of going onsite to collect a part number for the failing drive in the server. Charlie marks the ticket as “waiting materials” and makes a note that he can’t replace the drive until we order the part.

Now it is February 7th. We have explained, in writing, in Charlie’s ticket that we can’t order the part until he goes onsite and collects the part number, because we cannot get it because the server won’t report the part number if it’s in a raid array for reasons that I’ll be honest I do not understand.

Now it is February 14th. Charlie closes his ticket and he and Bob pull me into a meeting. The server at the client site is so old they’re not sure it’s a good idea to replace the drive. Charlie has recommended that the project team quote a migration to sharepoint, which the client has expressed interest in in the past. Bob makes a note of this in my ticket. But I do not close my ticket. I do not close my ticket because I know there must be some fuckery coming. So I put my ticket to “on hold” and set it to reactivate on March 10th so that I can follow up with the project team and see if the migration project is making any progress or if we still need to replace this drive because the server drive is still failing.

It is March 13th. I have a bad week. A very bad week. My manager looks at my open tickets and asks why on earth I still have a server drive failure ticket open from December. I explain that I only have it open to follow up on the migration because the technician suggested server replacement but if there wasn’t progress we should still quote a drive, but I still didn’t have the part number.

My manager puts me in a chat with me, Charlie, the Project team lead, my manager, and the service team lead and asks what the fuck is going on. I paste Charlie’s last update on my ticket and say that I’ll be happy to quote a hard drive but I still don’t have the part number.

Charlie says “Oh, I put the part number in the ticket” and pastes a photo of a drive (low light, low contrast, and blurry but with a visible part number) in the chat.

“Great!” I say, and immediately assemble a quote and find stock. Then i look back at my ticket. “But I’m actually not seeing the part number on this [my] ticket. Where was that again?”

Charlie has put the part number on his ticket, which I was never on, which he closed.

“Ah, okay. I see.”

And here’s where the different standards that all of us are used to using work against us.

My old job built RAID servers all the fucking time. It was totally standard, totally easy, totally sensible, and I always knew to double the number of drives we needed for the storage we got because we’d be mirroring. Because we’d be using RAID 10. Because it’s robust and can take a lot of failure. A drive failing in a server configured with RAID 10 is not ideal, but it’s also not a drop-everything and panic emergency. I *still* wouldn’t want to leave it two months in an ideal world but I can’t drive up to San Francisco and get a part number, and sometimes the world literally catches on fire.

However, these new folks use RAID 5.

A drive failing in a server configured with RAID 5 *IS* a drop everything emergency, because if one drive goes down the whole system goes down until you can replace the drive and rebuild the array, and because RAID 5 is slower than 10, this can take a very, very long time depending on how much data there is. And if *two* drives fail the data is *gone*

So.

Whose job is it to get the part number, and whose job is it to know that the server is at imminent risk of failure?

Well, now I have properly reconfigured my internal alarms about any failing server drive, but I don’t understand why none of the three technicians who worked on this ticket with me didn’t at any point say “hey this is an emergency” (Alice is from my old team and used to RAID 10 also, I’m willing to give her a pass) and I’m *really* confused why Bob and Charlie would recommend *not* replacing a drive in a server that is that close to failure.

(And again, I just didn’t know. Believe me, I am never, ever going to shut up about drive warning tickets in the future)

And, the thing that scares the shit out of me and my manager and part of the reason why this has been a bad week and I’m having stressful conversations: What if I had just closed that ticket instead of letting it reactivate to follow up on? What if I had just marked it as done when Charlie gave me the update? It wouldn’t have been an old-ass ticket in my queue that my manager flagged, it would have been a note in an after-action report when the client’s server crashed.

(The client has the quote now with the statement “this failing drive puts your server at risk of failure and we strongly recommend replacing” but they haven’t approved it yet because they’re really cheap so I’m going to have to send it again and say “this is a mission critical part that you need to replace; your server is at risk as long as the drive is not replaced.”)

So. The boss is asking “why is procurement taking so long” and really, now that I’m thinking about it - because he brought it up - how much of this really IS supposed to be my job?

Hey if you own a business I need you to repeat after me:

• I will not let my web developer manage my domain registration.
• My domains are my responsibility and they cannot be handed to a contractor.
• If I do not control my domains, I do not control my website.
• If my domain is paid for on somebody else’s credit card, it isn’t really mine.
• I will read every contract carefully and abide by its terms.
• If the terms of a contract are not agreeable to me, I will amend them until the contractor and I both agree to and are aware of the terms.
• I will pay my contractors in a timely fashion.
• I will not burn bridges with my contractors.
• I will pay for domain registration myself, and will never grant anyone else complete control over my domain.
• I will not let my web developer manage my domain registration.

I keep having extremely obvious epiphanies about how awful my old boss was.

“I was underpaid in my previous purchasing role.” Yes, good. True. Correct.

“My boss made me do things that were well beyond the standard role of purchasing/procurement.” An accurate, if belated, realization. Well done.

“WAIT. If I was underpaid for procurement then I was REALLY underpaid for whatever horrible hybrid helljob Gary concocted and shoved me into.” No shit, dumbass.

Many reasonable people in my inbox are telling me that the drive thing has some neurotypical nonsense churning about, and have pointed out that my brain is acting like a terrier with a rat when I should be acting like a retriever with a duck. I don’t need to keep shaking this until it’s dead, I need to bring it to a responsible party and drop it.

So basically if Danny, Elizabeth, or Frank doesn’t have a plan for this first thing, I’m creating a ticket in the morning and I’m assigning it to one of them and closing my ticket (with notes about reaching out and escalation, etc.) So that when this thing blows up in not the one holding it.

Funnel cake for dinner because why the fuck not?

When I was a kid I kept failing classes because I’d lose my homework. I’d finish it, but between the dining room table and the classroom it would just walk away. Sometimes it ended up in my backpack, sometimes it didn’t; sometimes I finished the homework at school and it got home in my backpack but wasn’t there the next day.

To attempt to address this, my parents got me a neon orange folder to put in my backpack; it was my homework folder, all homework was to go into that folder and that folder only, and it was to only come out of that folder when it was being worked on. I was to put homework in the homework folder as soon as it was assigned and if I’d worked on it, put it back in the folder as soon as it was finished. The logic here was that using the folder was supposed to be automatic, and you wanted a bright color so it wouldn’t get lost in the depths of a backpack.

I think I lost about eight of those before my parents stopped buying orange folders.

So it was very frustrating to search “how to be organized at work as an adult with ADHD” only to get a list that said “set alarms and write things down and try to make friends with a more organized person” which was immediately followed by tips to help your ADHD child stay organized and the one right at the top was to put their homework in a bright folder so they couldn’t lose it.

If you have been harmed by the ADHD Tips Industrial Complex you may be entitled to a packet of fun-dip and a cactus cooler as consolation for losing your homework folder again.