When the world outside slows to a crawl—roads iced over, flights grounded, power flickering—something remarkable happens behind the scenes.
The lights stay on.
The machines keep running.
The campaigns don’t break.
Not because it’s easy. Not because it’s glamorous. But because there are people who show up anyway.
This week’s record-breaking ice and snow blanketing much of the continental U.S. is a sharp reminder of how much depends on work we rarely see. While headlines focus on the storm itself, there’s a quieter story unfolding everywhere: people pulling on boots before dawn, troubleshooting systems from kitchen tables, checking dashboards late into the night, keeping operations moving when conditions say they shouldn’t.
These are the unsung heroes.
The cogs in the wheel.
The ones who keep the machine turning.
They’re not the faces in celebratory LinkedIn posts. They don’t always get tagged in product launches or scale milestones. There’s no applause when something doesn’t break, when customers never notice a near-miss, when a problem is solved before it becomes visible.
But that’s exactly the point.
This kind of work is built on grit. On sweat. On quiet accountability.
It’s choosing reliability over recognition. Execution over applause. Responsibility over excuses.
It’s the engineer who jumps in before anyone asks.
The ops lead who reroutes around a failure at 2 a.m.
The marketer who keeps campaigns live through outages and constraints.
The support, logistics, finance, IT, facilities, and operations teams who make “business as usual” possible when nothing about the day is usual.
On days like this—when the environment is unforgiving—it becomes obvious who truly keeps things running.
So today isn’t about celebrating scale or launches or wins you can chart on a slide.
It’s about recognizing the people who hold the line.
Who keep the lights on.
Who make progress possible by preventing failure.
To everyone doing the hard, unglamorous work behind the scenes:
We see you.
We appreciate you.
And none of this works without you.
Thank you for keeping the wheels turning.