About Eric

Growing Up in Dayton

I grew up in Kettering, just south of Dayton.

It was a fairly ordinary Midwestern childhood. We weren’t a family that replaced things simply because something newer appeared. If an appliance stopped working, somebody looked at it first. Receipts went into drawers. Instruction manuals somehow survived for years. My dad had a habit of keeping little pieces of hardware because they “might belong to something.”

As a kid, I thought most of this was ridiculous.

I’ve unfortunately become the same person.

I went to Fairmont High School in Kettering. Computers were becoming increasingly important during those years, and ours at home was temperamental enough that owning one often meant learning how to fix one.

I wasn’t the kid building computers from individual components at age nine. My introduction was much less impressive. Something would stop working, nobody in the house knew why, and eventually I would start clicking through settings and searching the internet until either the problem disappeared or I made it considerably worse.

Both outcomes were educational.

That habit of trying to understand why something happened stayed with me long after the computers improved.

College Didn’t Go According to Plan

After high school, I enrolled at Sinclair Community College in downtown Dayton.

I took a mixture of general education, communication, and computer-related classes without having a grand career plan behind them. I was interested in too many unrelated things and wasn’t particularly good at pretending otherwise.

At the same time, I was working.

Eventually work won.

I left Sinclair without finishing a degree, initially telling myself I’d go back the following year. The following year became the year after that, and eventually I stopped describing college as something I was temporarily taking a break from.

For years, I considered that unfinished chapter an embarrassment.

Age has changed my opinion.

It taught me that I enjoy learning far more when there’s an actual problem attached to it. Give me a broad subject and an exam date and my attention wanders. Give me an irritating question I cannot answer and I can lose an evening to it.

That has turned out to be surprisingly useful.

A String of Very Normal Jobs

My twenties did not contain a dramatic career breakthrough.

I stocked shelves and worked around a grocery stockroom. I spent time dealing with residents, contractors, maintenance requests, and paperwork around apartment properties. Later came customer-service and operations work where much of the job involved finding information scattered across invoices, product documentation, company systems, shipping records, policies, and people’s memories.

None of those jobs made me an authority on the subjects I write about today.

They did teach me something I use constantly: the answer written in the manual and the answer a person actually needs are not always the same thing.

A policy might technically explain a fee without making it clear whether you have to pay it.

A product manual might tell you which button to press without explaining why the option isn’t appearing.

A business can provide three pages of information without answering the one question that caused you to visit its website.

I became increasingly interested in that gap.

Moving to Columbus

I moved to Columbus in my mid-twenties, initially into a small apartment in the Clintonville area.

Moving cities, changing jobs, watching expenses, dealing with landlords, comparing insurance, maintaining an aging car, buying furniture, planning trips, replacing electronics, understanding bills and generally figuring out adulthood produced an endless supply of small questions.

It also confirmed something friends and family had already noticed about me.

I research things too much.

Ask me whether a $40 purchase is worth buying and there is a genuine risk I’ll spend more than $40 worth of my time finding out.

My wife has learned that asking me a seemingly innocent question can result in four browser tabs, a PDF manual and a text message beginning with, “Okay, this is more complicated than I expected.”

She rarely considers this an advantage.

Occasionally it is.

How I Ended Up Writing for the Internet

I didn’t start writing because I wanted to become a lifestyle guru.

The internet already has enough of those.

I started because I kept encountering questions where the available answers were incomplete, outdated, copied from somewhere else, or buried underneath paragraphs that seemed determined not to get to the point.

Some were technology questions.

Others involved travel, shopping, businesses, food, household problems or terminology I had encountered for the first time myself.

At first these subjects seemed unrelated.

Eventually I realized the connection was the reader.

Most people aren’t spending Tuesday afternoon thinking deeply about parking policies, Windows settings, product labels or some obscure business term because those are their lifelong passions.

They are looking because they need to know something right now.

That’s the person I like writing for.

Why You’ll Find So Many Different Subjects Here

My life doesn’t fit neatly into a website category, and I doubt yours does either.

In the same week I might need to troubleshoot a computer, compare something before buying it, understand a charge, research a destination, work out what a label actually means and figure out why a company has a policy that appears to make no sense.

That is why my writing moves between subjects.

I don’t claim expertise in all of them.

My job is to research the question properly, distinguish reliable information from repetition, and explain what I find without pretending the subject is simpler than it really is.

When there’s an authoritative source, I want to find it.

When the manufacturer’s documentation answers the question, I’d rather use that than cite somebody who cites somebody who supposedly read the manual.

When government rules or official policies matter, those should be checked.

When reliable sources disagree, that’s worth telling you too.

And when I cannot establish something confidently, I’d rather say so than fill the gap with a confident-sounding guess.

I’m Suspicious of Perfect Answers

One thing adulthood has cured me of is expecting reality to cooperate with simple rules.

A lot of useful answers begin with “usually.”

Policies have exceptions. Products change. Software gets updated. Prices vary by location. A process that works perfectly for one person can fail because of a detail neither person initially thought mattered.

That doesn’t mean every article needs twenty disclaimers.

It means a useful article should tell you about the exceptions that could actually change your decision.

I also don’t believe every question needs a long article.

Sometimes the honest answer is two paragraphs.

If something requires 3,000 words to explain properly, I’ll use them. If I can solve your problem in 300, I’d rather give you the rest of your afternoon back.

Things I Like When I’m Not Researching Something

I’m still an Ohioan in most of the predictable ways.

I like road trips more than flying when the distance is reasonable. I have a weakness for old diners and restaurants that clearly haven’t redesigned their menus in fifteen years. I enjoy walking around unfamiliar neighborhoods, used bookstores, hardware stores when I don’t actually need anything, and taking the longer route home simply because I’ve never driven down a particular road.

I still keep instruction manuals longer than necessary.

I still take photographs of model numbers before throwing packaging away.

I still think I’ll remember where I put something important instead of writing it down.

I almost never do.

My interests tend to rotate. For a few weeks I can become fascinated by some obscure corner of technology, food production, transportation, consumer products or how a particular business works. Then something else catches my attention.

Writing gives that curiosity somewhere useful to go.

What I Promise Readers

I won’t pretend I’ve personally tested something when I haven’t.

I won’t turn research into a fake personal experience.

I won’t call myself an expert simply because I wrote an article about a subject.

If professional expertise matters, that distinction should be obvious.

What I can promise is effort.

I want to trace important claims back to good sources, check whether information is still current, understand the question before trying to answer it, and write for the person who came here because they actually need help with something.

And if I get something wrong, I want it corrected.

The internet has enough articles defending yesterday’s information simply because changing them would mean admitting they became outdated.

I’d rather have the useful answer.

The Short Version

I’m Eric Dawson.

I grew up near Dayton, started college without finishing it, worked a collection of ordinary jobs, moved to Columbus, became the person people around me asked to research strangely specific questions, and eventually realized that I genuinely enjoy doing it.

This site is where those questions end up.

Some will be important.

Some will be wonderfully trivial.

Both can ruin your afternoon when you can’t find the answer.

If one of my articles saves you from opening another twelve browser tabs, it has probably done its job.

Eric Dawson
Columbus, Ohio