Employee Spotlight – Meet Krystal Son, Escalation Team Lead

Meet Krystal Son, Escalation Team Lead here at KiteTech! Krystal has been with us for 8 years and a typical day for her involves dispatching tickets, leading meetings, assisting technicians, organizing and publishing documentation, delegating, finding ways to be more efficient, and having fun while doing it all!

For years, it was Krystal’s dream to live in the Pacific Northwest due to the cooler weather, mountains and pine trees. Four years ago, she happily moved there and now calls Seattle, Washington her home. 

Outside of work, Krystal loves to game, read fiction (especially sci-fi and fantasy), play D&D with her friends, and hike. Krystal and her husband are also huge foodies, so they enjoy discovering new places to eat. 

Before working at KiteTech, what was the most unusual or interesting job you’ve ever had?

What do you like most about your job?

I like to have fun and not take things too seriously, and I like to be able to weave some of that into our culture and operations at KiteTech, so that technicians feel like they can have fun and express themselves at work. I’m fortunate to work at a company that encourages bringing personality into the job and being able to kick back and have fun from time to time.

What would people never guess you do in your role?

I’ve been known to pull some pranks occasionally. I worked with a colleague of mine once to run a script on all our office computers that would eject the CD drive once every few hours (back when almost every computer had them). There was also another time where myself and my partner-in-crime, while targeting one of the manager’s computers, replaced the sound file of the new-email message to instead be a recording of a friend’s voice saying “HELLOOO!!” very exuberantly. This manager often listened to the radio from their computer with some very nice speakers at a pretty decent volume. So once this sound file (which was recorded to be much louder than regular volume) was replaced and the next email came in, the entire office was privy to a very loud “HELLOOOO!!!” coming from their office that they instantly recognized. That was a fun day.

Do you have a favorite quote?

One of the wonderful things about getting older is that you start to care a lot less about what other people think, and it is very freeing. As most people can relate, when we’re young we’re not only pressured by societal standards and way of life, but also peer pressure and family ideals and obligations we feel we’re bound to. Getting older and realizing that all that noise doesn’t matter as much as you thought it did, really changes perspectives, and in my case, happiness. So the quote I will provide that I saw somewhere once is: “Your idea of me is not my responsibility to live up to”. It was meaningful to me at the time I read it due to the absolute freedom this perspective provided me.

Favorite line from a movie?

From Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: “In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you. You think because I’m kind that it means I’m naïve, and maybe I am. It’s strategic and necessary. This is how I fight. The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don’t know what’s going on”.

Do you have an office nickname? What is it and how did you get it?

When I was in Air Force tech school, our usernames to log into the training system was our last name followed by the first letter of our first name, which for me ended up being “koraltank” (my maiden name). The teacher thought the end was great, and started calling me “tank”. This picked up and for the rest of my Air Force career, even after I married and my last name changed, I was known as “tank”. It made trips to paintball with tech school friends extra fun.

We hope you enjoying learning some new things about Krystal! Want to get to know more of our employees? Check out our previous spotlights to meet Justin Wise, Nathan Taylor, Shane Briscoe, and Chris Roop.