Happiness engineer resolves computer drama
By Emma Palova
EW Emma’s Writings
Lowell, MI-Happiness comes in many forms. What brings a smile to your face?
A WordPress happiness engineer brought a smile back to my face.
I panicked after I lost two-thirds of followers of EW Emma’s Writings on Monday. The photo below depicts exactly what I felt like. The caricature is by Olin Pink

“Losing followers, including shares and subscriptions, is like losing gold or accounts,” I wrote in the original story that I have decided to completely rewrite.
The help I received was efficient, fast, analytical and comforting. Each email ended with “Cheers.”
I got links that narrowed down the problem and finally resolved it with a best wishes farewell.

Happiness engineering reminds me of Russian nesting dolls. Happiness engineers work to narrow down the problem and what caused it.
The happiness engineers around the world work as a team until the problem is solved.
The WordPress support distributed team works in a similar environment like the users, according to a presentation by happiness engineer Andrew Spittle. Here is an excerpt from Spittle’s talk at a 2013 conference in San Francisco.
The second principle I hold to be true is that happy people are most inclined to share and spread that happiness.
We’re Happiness Engineers, right? We don’t want to create a culture of sadness. That’s not going to help our users. If we can orient decisions toward increasing our happiness then it will also inevitably increase our users’ happiness.
We can step back from the pressure, trends, and isolation of any particular geographic area. There isn’t a central, geographic ideology that’s predominant. The languages, values, ideas, and lifestyles of our team are distributed around the world, just like our users.
That built-in geographic distribution, what I earlier called being location-agnostic, means we can say No to a lot of things. A lot of things people assume to be required of a customer support gig we don’t need to worry about. In our day-to-day work we have:
We have no set shifts. We prescribe no particular schedule. And we ensure that no one pulls a graveyard shift.
Thanks to the entire support team and especially to the angel happiness engineer somewhere out there in that vast Internet space.
Copyright © 2014 story and photo by Emma Palova