The Real Jen Z

Tag: tech

  • Tech For Real People

    Tech For Real People

    Part 1 – The Cloud

    I have a confession to make: For a long time, the Cloud was my arch-nemesis.

    I’m a person who likes tangible things. I like the weight of a physical book and the crinkle of a printed photo. When people told me my files were “in the Cloud,” I felt like I had dropped my car keys into a fog bank. If I couldn’t see the box holding my stuff, how did I know it wouldn’t just… drift away?

    If you are staring at a “Storage Full” notification with a mix of confusion and rage, this post is for you.

    The “Wallet vs. The Bank” Realization

    The breakthrough for me happened when I stopped thinking of my phone as a box and started thinking of it as a wallet.

    Imagine your Grandma is walking around with her life savings in $1 bills stuffed into her purse.

    The Pain Point: Eventually, the purse won’t zip shut. It’s heavy, it’s cluttered, and if she loses that purse, everything is gone.

    The Solution: She puts that money into a Bank.

    The Cloud: The Bank is the Cloud. It’s a big, secure building somewhere else that holds the bulk of her “stuff” so she doesn’t have to carry it.

    “But how do I see my pictures?”

    This is where the mystery usually deepens. If the pictures are at the “bank,” why can she still see them on her screen?

    I tell her: “Grandma, your phone is just your Debit Card.”

    When you use a debit card at the store, the money isn’t inside the plastic card. The card is just the “key” that reaches into the bank and pulls the money out for a second. When she scrolls through her photos, her phone is reaching into the “Digital Bank,” grabbing that memory, and showing it to her.

    The Phone: Her wallet (limited space).
    The Cloud: The vault (infinite space).
    Wi-Fi: The armored truck that moves the photos back and forth.

    Why it’s okay to not “see” it

    The reason I struggled for so long is that I didn’t trust what I couldn’t touch. But once I realized that the Cloud isn’t a “place in the sky” – it’s just a Digital Safety Deposit Box – the anxiety started to fade.

    Now, when Grandma asks, “Is it over the house?” I can smile and say, “No, it’s in the vault. And your ‘wallet’ has plenty of room for more cat pictures now.”

  • The Box is a Lie

    The Box is a Lie

    For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to fit. Fit the mold. Fit the expectations. Fit the way other people seemed to move through the world so effortlessly while I was over here doing high-stakes mental gymnastics just to survive a casual conversation.

    I didn’t know I was “masking” back then. I just thought I was bad at being a human.

    School was the first cage. Sit still. Pay attention. Follow the steps in order. Don’t ask “why,” just do it the way everyone else does. But my brain doesn’t move in straight lines; it moves in spirals, side doors, and sudden bursts of understanding that usually hit me three days after the lesson ended. In a classroom, that’s called a problem. In the real world, it’s called perspective.

    I spent years performing. I learned the right faces to make, the right jargon to drop, the right way to pretend I was keeping up. I worked, I “passed,” and then I stepped into the biggest, most complex box of all – motherhood.

    I became a stay-at-home mom, a role that demands a different kind of disappearing act. You spend years being the advocate, the protector, and the manager of everyone else’s world while your own edges start to blur. When I finally decided to re-enter the workforce, I didn’t just want a job. I wanted to find the person I’d been sanding down for decades.

    I started in a role where I was advocating for others – a natural fit for someone who “feels everything.” But then, something unexpected happened. That role evolved. It shifted. It became technical.

    And suddenly, I was in a room full of boxes again.

    I work in tech now. If you knew me back then, you’d be laughing. I’m not a “tech person” by any traditional definition. I don’t speak in acronyms. When someone explains a complex system to me, my brain immediately translates it into an analogy about cooking or parenting before it makes any sense.

    That is exactly why I’m good at what I do.

    I spent years advocating for my kids and for my clients, and now I’m advocating for the user. I work for a company that looked at my “too much-ness” – my empathy, my over-analyzing, my need to bridge the gap – and said, “That’s the missing piece.” They don’t need me to be a robot. They need me to be the translator. The one who can sit with a frustrated person and say, “I hear you, I get it, and let’s make this make sense.”

    I’m getting paid to think the way I used to apologize for.

    I’m not going to lie and say I’ve reached some zen state of total self-love. Unlearning decades of “you’re doing it wrong” takes time. Some days, I still catch myself trying to shrink or feeling the “imposter syndrome” that comes with being a woman in tech who didn’t take the straight-line path.

    But I know the truth now. The problem was never me. The problem was the container.

    I’m writing this for the people still trying to sand down their edges. For the moms re-entering the world wondering if their “soft skills” even matter (they do). For the ones who think they’re broken because they don’t learn in straight lines.

    I’m writing this because you need to know that the box is optional. The thing you think is your biggest flaw – that intensity, that sensitivity, that “weird” way of seeing the world – is actually your greatest strength.

    You don’t have to fit. You just have to find the people and places that have finally stopped asking you to.

    They exist. I promise. I’m living proof.