Twenty years in networking before I said the word 'dyslexia' out loud at work

I got into networking in the early 2000s the way a lot of us did: I was the kid who fixed the family PC, then the office PC, then the office. I never finished the degree. Reading dense textbooks defeated me every time, but give me a broken network and a console cable and I could see the problem in a way colleagues couldn't.

The job was never the problem. The paperwork was. Change requests, incident reports, RFC documents - I would spend three hours on a write-up a colleague finished in twenty minutes, then still get it back with spelling corrections in red. I turned down two promotions because the next grade up meant more documents and more meetings where someone might ask me to read.

The worst part was the energy cost of hiding it. Re-reading every email five times before sending. Volunteering for night shifts partly because there were fewer people watching.

Three things changed everything:

• Text-to-speech for everything. I listen to RFCs, tickets and emails instead of reading them. Speeds vary - docs at 1.2x, emails at 1.8x.
• Dictation for first drafts. My incident reports are now spoken, then tidied. The quality went up - turns out I explain things well out loud.
• One manager who got it. I disclosed to one person, informally, after she mentioned her son was dyslexic. She quietly stopped routing 'read this 40-page doc by Friday' work to me and started routing 'figure out why this is broken' work instead.

You don't owe anyone a disclosure, and you don't have to do it the official way first. Test the water with one trusted person. And stop treating the workarounds as cheating - the TTS, the dictation, the diagrams-instead-of-paragraphs. The output is the job, not the reading.