I Manage Other People's Emotions All Day. At Night, I Just Want to Play Guitar

It was a Friday night. Everyone on the team had logged off, and Lin, the only junior, was still online. A server had a critical incident, and she got pulled straight into a customer meeting. She had just started the job, with zero experience. “I went straight into soothing the customer’s emotions. I didn’t ask about the incident’s business impact, didn’t triage its severity.” Years later, this is how she recalls herself that night: “I did badly.”

She works in post-sales customer relations at the cloud division of a major tech company in London, helping large customers get the most out of the company’s infrastructure and services. Cloud servers fail from time to time, and critical failures don’t pick a time: weekends, the small hours, whenever. Incidents come in severity levels, and each level has a mature playbook: no significant business impact, file a ticket and follow the process; a serious incident, and the on-call engineer jumps in immediately, no matter how late it is. A post-sales manager with over a decade of experience can size up an incident’s severity within the first few minutes of the meeting. That night, all she could do was soothe and stall.

I was a little surprised: isn’t soothing the customer first the right thing to do?

“Part of our job is managing the customer,” she said. “Communicate, don’t coddle. You have to ask what business impact the incident is actually causing; you can’t just keep deferring. Unreasonable requests have to be turned down. There’s no way to satisfy every customer demand.”

The job requires her to be a generalist, knowing a little about every product line, then picking one specialty. She picked agentic BI. The choice traces back to a CS course from her student days. “I tried as hard as I could. A single bug might take me hours to fix, sometimes a whole day.” The grades came back, and they weren’t good. That’s when she knew she wasn’t cut out to go all in on code, but she could stand in the middle, between code and business. Later, her data visualization courses all scored high. “I like using technical means to find the business insight underneath.”

Lin did her undergrad in Canada. “It snows eight months a year there.” So during those years in Canada, she really did study. She came to the UK for her master’s and fell in love with London. “London is a romantic city. Walking across a bridge, you see the evening glow, the Thames, the red buses. And you can visit the Sherlock Holmes Museum; pure joy for a die-hard fan.” Summers here aren’t hot, and many of her high school and university classmates stayed, so she isn’t lonely. The only city that ranks alongside London as her favorite is her hometown, Wuhan.

But work is not evening glow and red buses. Big-company work is intense. Weekdays burn through brainpower, so on weekends she empties her head: badminton, rock climbing. The first year was the most stressful, she says. She didn’t know how to use the internal tools, screens full of in-house jargon made no sense, and as a fresh graduate she was pulled into customer meetings after just three months of training. She sat in those meetings like she was invisible, not knowing what to say; many meetings skipped even her self-introduction. She found her footing by taking ownership of her own line of business, and the confidence built up from there.

The past few years of AI progress have helped a lot. Answering a customer question used to take an hour or two, and sometimes only after answering would she find out the customer actually cared about a different question. Now that time is at least cut in half, and AI can read through every log in the history, understanding and solving the problem with full context. Her specialty, agentic BI, has changed even more: business people used to hand requirements to engineers, then wait for the sprint, wait for the dashboard; now that middle layer is gradually being replaced by AI. Business people ask AI directly, and the analysis and visualizations come right out.

She’s quite happy with the job. “Other than being busy, there’s nothing wrong with it. The team atmosphere is great, the customer relationships are well maintained, and I’ve learned a lot.”

It’s just that everything keeps getting faster, and she can’t go back to a slow rhythm anymore. The longer she works, the less she can tolerate wasted time. Once, she booked a house viewing with an agent: an hour round trip, and when she arrived, the agent had stood her up, on a day when she still had unfinished work on her plate. She let him have it on the phone: “What do you mean you forgot?” Then she blocked him. Back home that night, she worked past midnight.

She used to be the F type among her friends (the feeler, in MBTI terms), the designated listener who caught everyone else’s negative emotions. These days, she mostly steps away from those scenes, goes back to her room alone, plays guitar, and sings.

Right. She’s a guitar-and-vocals cover artist.