IT Professionals Day is Tuesday, September 15 — a good excuse to think about a specific gap in how most companies hand out credit.

Here’s the shape of it. Someone can’t get into the system at 4:50 on a Friday. They file a ticket. Someone in IT picks it up, figures out that a permissions group got restructured three weeks ago, fixes it, and the person makes their deadline. Monday morning, the deadline being met gets mentioned in a standup. The ticket does not.

Credit flows toward whoever was closest to the outcome. IT is almost never closest to the outcome — IT is one step upstream, removing the thing that would have prevented it.

The support relationship is asymmetric by design

You contact IT on your worst day. Your laptop is dead, you’re locked out, the demo is in twenty minutes. By the time it’s fixed you’re already sprinting toward the thing you were trying to do, and the interaction ends the moment your problem does.

That’s not rudeness. It’s just what a support relationship does — it resolves and then it evaporates. Which means the accumulated experience of being on the receiving end is a long list of people’s emergencies and a short list of follow-ups.

An occasion is a way to close the loop late

The value of a day like this isn’t the day. It’s that it gives you a reason to go back to something that got resolved in March and say the thing you didn’t say then, because in March you were busy being relieved.

Specifics work better than volume here. “Thanks for the migration” is fine. “Thanks for staying on the call until my machine came back up the night before the board meeting” is the one that gets remembered, because it proves the person on the other end of the ticket registered as a person.

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If your IT team is a handful of people who quietly keep everyone else running, a group card is an easy way to get all those late thank-yous into one place. Everyone contributes the specific thing they never got around to saying, and it arrives as one document instead of a scattering of Slack replies.

Start one at cardjoy.app.