The Porchlight Protocol

Dial-up internet, digital punch clocks, and realizing I might be the problem (but also maybe the patch).

I was twenty, working my first real tech support job for a small dial-up ISP called Porchlight, and learning that nothing builds character quite like explaining to someone’s grandparents why they can’t stay on the phone with you and try to get back online to troubleshoot at the same time.

Yes, you'll have to write it down and call me back... I'm sorry... No, It's not easy for me either.... Don't worry, we'll get through it.

The schedule was novel, and often, so were the people & their problems, which I needed in my life (and had a lot of patience for). My shifts were 10am to 10pm, Monday to Wednesday.

For someone like me—momentum-based, easily derailed, needs time to spiral into things—This was a perfect burst of work energy. But, as allergic to cold starts as I was - that first shift back after 4 days off felt like being rebooted from BIOS

Every.

Damn.

Time.

And more often than not on that Monday morning, I'd be late.

I'm not talking like missed entire meetings late, but like, probably hit the snooze button a couple extra times, spoiled by all the sleeping in I've been doing the past several days, and now I'm rolling in 3 minutes past the hour late. Not crazy…

Still. Late.

And staring me straight in the face with its big angry countdown:

The digital “punch clock”. This thing was brutal. If you were even one minute late, it rounded up to a full fifteen.

So naturally, if I found myself getting there at 10:03 on Monday, I would just grab myself a bagel next door, and roll in at 10:14 instead.

That was the first click in my brain—one of the earliest professional signs that I was going to be a problem for poorly designed systems. But not in the way you'd think.

It wasn’t defiance. It was optimization. It was efficiency in the face of bad math.

It was the realization that when a system fails to meet people where they are, people will rewrite the system for themselves.

It made me wonder...

what if we encouraged people to achieve a goal to get to where they need to be, instead of punishing them for where they’re not?

But the idea that maybe, just maybe, there was a better way to build work seemed so far out of my area of influence at the time, and I didn’t have the lived experience or the language for explaining systems thinking, human-centered design or neurodivergent workflows to any of my superiors.

I just knew that the punch clock was stupid and I just knew if I was going to be penalized for more time than I was late anyway, I should benefit from that time.

The process didn't incentivize punctuality. It incentivized passive resistance. It was dissonance embedded in a policy that measured my success.

At twenty, I was just trying not to get fired. But was I late, or was I just early to the real problem: bad systems punish initiative and call it order. I didn’t need a bagel. I needed a better protocol.

Okay, yeah, I was still late.

But here’s the thing they didn’t consider: you don’t have to punish people to get results. There are better ways than “one minute late = 15-minute penalty” to get people to do what you actually need them to do.

Later, I’d see this same pattern in leadership, parenting, and process design:

Systems fail when they optimize for control instead of context.

Training staff takes time. Ramp-up takes time. Take that time your giving away, use it to reinforce habits that matter instead of burning it on compliance theater.

Work with the humans in your system. Build ways for them to re-engage instead of punishing them into disengagement. Most of the time, you don’t need to force people to comply. You just need to invite them to participate.

I’m telling this story, because it was the first time I started to realize:

Maybe I'm not here to just follow systems. Maybe I’m here to repair the ones that forget people are part of the equation.