Almost every week, someone walks up to my support desk, slides a phone across to me and asks how to free up storage on their phone, usually with the same complaint: “It says storage is full and I didn’t download anything.” Then I open the storage screen and find 40 GB of video from a kid’s recital, three years of group chat memes, a podcast app holding 200 episodes nobody will ever play, and a navigation app with offline maps of a country they visited once in 2022. People don’t usually lose storage to one big thing. It goes slowly, a little at a time, through a lot of small…

If you’ve ever asked yourself what is two-factor authentication and whether it’s worth the bother, let me answer with a story first. A few years into my career, a client called me on a Monday morning in a panic. Over the weekend, her business email had been sending invoices with new bank details to her customers, and two of them had paid. Her password wasn’t weak, either. In fact, it was twelve characters with a capital letter, a number and a symbol. The trouble was that she had also used that same password on a small online shop that got breached a year earlier. As a result, someone bought that…

Every time I teach a room full of employees how to create a strong password, I start with the same question. “Raise your hand if you use the same password, or a slight variation of it, on more than one account.” The room hesitates. A few hands go up. Then a few more. By the time people realize their coworkers are being honest, most of the room has a hand in the air. I don’t ask that question to shame anyone. I ask it because it tells me the real problem. People are not careless. They feel overwhelmed. The average person juggles dozens of logins, and for years, bad advice…

Every training session I run on how to spot a phishing email starts the same way. I put a real email on the screen, one that landed in someone’s inbox the week before, and I ask the room a simple question: would you click this? Usually about half the hands go up. Then I show them where the link actually goes, and the room goes quiet. That quiet moment is the whole point of my job. After years of teaching people how to spot a phishing email, I have learned that nobody falls for these messages because they are careless or unintelligent. They fall for them because the email arrived…

Few questions in my field cause as much quiet confusion as VPN vs proxy, and one incident made that especially clear to me. A few years into my career, I got pulled into an incident review at a mid sized accounting firm. A staff member had been working from a hotel lobby, and she swore up and down that she was “protected” because she had a proxy extension running in her browser. To be fair, she was right that her IP address was hidden from the websites she visited. However, she was wrong about almost everything else. Her email client, her cloud sync app, and a background update service were…

Almost every team I talk to has the same story. Somebody discovered an AI assistant, showed everyone how to use AI at work to get a draft in thirty seconds that would have taken an hour, and the whole office got excited. Then, a few weeks later, a client email went out with a made-up statistic in it. Or a report landed on a manager’s desk that looked polished and said absolutely nothing. The excitement turned into suspicion, and now half the team uses AI quietly while the other half refuses to touch it. We sat down with an AI Integration and Workflow Specialist who spends most of the week…

What is cloud computing, really? I get asked some version of that question almost every week. Sometimes it comes from a founder who just signed a hosting contract and isn’t sure what they bought. Other times it’s a marketing manager who keeps hearing “we’re moving to the cloud” in meetings and nods along. Once it was my own father, who wanted to know why his photos were “in the sky.” So instead of writing another textbook explainer, I’ve put this together the way I’d answer it over coffee. In other words, these are the real questions people bring to me, in roughly the order they come up, with the answers…