The screen I couldn't read

There was a screen in that office I could never quite read. Rows of numbers, currencies, changing fast enough that I gave up trying to follow them within the first week. I was a university student doing IT support at a small currency exchange brokerage in Brazil. My job was hardware, passwords, the unglamorous plumbing that keeps an office running. The traders' job, a few meters away, was that screen.

I never worked up the nerve to ask what the numbers meant, but I noticed everything around them. Which trader got quiet right before the screen moved. Which calls got picked up on the first ring and which got ignored. I started keeping a mental list of questions I didn't have the vocabulary to ask yet. That habit, collecting unanswered questions and waiting for the moment I'd have the tools to answer them, turned out to be the most useful thing I took from that job. It would show up again at LG, on an airline's systems team, and eventually, fully formed, in payments product, where I currently work.

At LG, the screen changed but the instinct was the same. I joined the quality team on mobile phone manufacturing, and instead of waiting for someone to explain why a global spec sheet kept colliding with local reality, I started asking around: why does this fail here and not in Korea, who actually approved this tolerance, what happens if we just don't bend on this one. LG built phones as global platforms, the same design, the same ambition, shipped everywhere. Except Brazil had its own regulations, its own quality bar, its own way of breaking that nobody in a global spec sheet had anticipated. Someone had to sit in that gap and decide, case by case, what should bend. That was usually me, mostly because I kept asking until someone let me.

The airline came next, and on paper it reads like a sideways move: software developer, then DevOps. What it actually gave me was a different vantage point on the same problem, and this time I went looking on purpose. Instead of waiting to be handed the funnel data, I started pulling logs nobody had asked me to pull, just to see where a ticket purchase stalled, why an add-on service got abandoned at the last screen. DevOps trains you to think about a system as a chain of failure points, and once you've gone hunting for failure points in infrastructure, you can't really stop doing it with people clicking through a checkout flow. I wasn't assigned curiosity. I just couldn't switch it off.

None of this looked like a plan. A brokerage, a phone manufacturer, an airline, then product management at PPRO across QA, Agile, Delivery, and Risk and Fraud, and now as a Senior PM for LATAM Payments at dLocal. If you'd told twenty-year-old me, fixing a printer while traders yelled in a language I didn't speak yet, that all of it would eventually click into one job, I wouldn't have believed you. But it did click. The brokerage taught me to recognize high-stakes complexity before I had a name for it. LG taught me that global and local are always negotiating, never settled. The airline taught me that a funnel is just a system, and systems are knowable.

I still think about that screen sometimes. Not because I ever learned to read those exact numbers, but because I never stopped wanting to. I just kept finding new screens, new systems, new closed rooms, and walking toward them instead of around them, one industry at a time, until that habit of chasing the thing I didn't understand became the job itself. I still don't know what the next unreadable screen will be. I just know I'll go looking for it.