Two years of using an electronic paper tablet for network drawings and daily notes, before it was a city device at all.
The interesting part was the collision. The enterprise web filtering estate — which I had built — was breaking the device’s sync, and the SSL intercept had to be given an explicit allowance before city-owned units could work at all. Personal kit became a formally supported endpoint by way of a whitelist request filed against my own control.
That is worth recording because it is the ordinary shape of a shadow-IT problem seen from the other side. A control that blocks a legitimate tool does not announce itself; it produces a device that “doesn’t work” and a user who stops asking. The only reason this one resolved is that the person hitting the wall happened to own the wall.
It then spread on its own — City Council and the Kids Hope Alliance in use, Court Administration asking for ten — and the assessment session that followed was a demo, a question-and-answer, and two named use cases: organizing notes across the meeting load, and sketching network diagrams during change and incident work so a team can see the layout and where the fault sits.
Outcome
A working design tool adopted across three organizations, and an SSL-intercept exception written against a control I owned.