Last night I spent two hours trying to get AI to post images to my WordPress blog.

After going down every rabbit hole imaginable, I finally gave AI one instruction:

"Give me the simplest, most foolproof solution. No clever hacks. No elaborate Python. Pretend I'm exhausted and just want the thing to work."

It did.

That somehow turned into a conversation about all the little pieces of tribal knowledge every IT veteran collects over the years.

So consider these AI-assisted, human-approved, and field-tested against production.

Operator Maxims

1. The phrase "all you have to do is..." is the leading cause of undocumented technical debt.
2. Never confuse motion with progress. Six months of meetings is not a project. One working prototype is.
3. The first AI answer is a junior technician: useful, confident, and occasionally spectacularly wrong. Review accordingly.
4. If three AI models agree, verify anyway. Consensus is not evidence.
5. Every five-minute tutorial secretly contains four hours of prerequisites.
6. If the tutorial begins with "Obviously...", clear your afternoon.
7. Documentation is an apology to Future You. Be kind. Future You already has enough problems.
8. Never memorize what you can document. Memorize judgment instead.
9. Everything is a cable until proven otherwise.
10. When troubleshooting exceeds two cups of coffee, go outside and observe something that does not require overclocking your brain's CPU.

That's about 25 years of enterprise IT, a lot of coffee, several AI conversations, one dumpster fan, two squirrels who still think I'm holding out on the peanut inventory, and I generated enough profanity to train the next large language model.

AI assists. Humans approve. Operators document the parts everyone else forgot.

David Letterman’s iconic "Top Ten List" The ultimate signs that you are a Gen X IT professional

Top Ten Signs You Are a Gen X IT Professional

• 10. You still reflexively search for a physical turbo button when your laptop lags.
• 9. Your internal clock is calibrated to the exact cadence of a 56k dial-up modem handshake.
• 8. You remember when "the cloud" was just a fluffy shape you drew on a whiteboard to avoid explaining networking infrastructure.
• 7. You have a deeply buried, irrational fear of the year 2000 repeating itself.
• 6. Your posture is permanently molded from carrying a 15-pound "portable" Compaq computer across an airport terminal in 1996.
• 5. You are the only person in the building who knows that the "Save" icon is actually a physical object that held 1.44 megabytes of data.
• 4. You still look at your younger coworkers with mild disgust because they have never had to manually assign an IRQ address to a Sound Blaster card.
• 3. Your primary troubleshooting technique is still just aggressively blowing dust out of an expensive component.
• 2. You secretly miss the absolute authority of telling an annoying user to "RTFM."
• 1. Your retirement plan relies entirely on the hope that some bank’s critical infrastructure is still running on COBOL, and you are the last living person who speaks it.

Hello, I am an Xfinity internet customer at an apartment community in League City, Texas (77573).

My connection is entirely offline because the physical exterior drop line supplying my unit has cut and left exposed on the ground behind the hedges.

I scheduled a repair appointment for tonight, Friday the 19th, from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM. I have been without internet service for 2 days and work from home, my boss is furious that I'm not online to meet a project deadline.

The technician called me from an unknown number before arrival. I missed the live call but immediately called back within a few minutes and left a detailed voicemail providing the exact gate code, building entry instructions, and my apartment number.

The technician (Garret) never showed up to my unit.

I waited until 7:00 PM (an hour past the window) and finally got back in touch with him. He admitted he was just sitting at the gate when he called.

When I told him that I called right back and left the gate code on his voicemail, he said he did not check his voicemail and I asked why he didn't call a 2nd time or text me, he told me flat-out, "We don't do that," and left me hanging with zero remorse, telling me I just have to make a second appointment.

I have already waited through a 2-day queue, did my part, and provided full property access on his voicemail.

I need a Digital Care Specialist to escalate this blatant service failure straight to the local League City field management team to get a supervisor or dispatch technician back out here to replace this dropped line.

Please let me know when I can securely send my account verification details.

Thank you.