Quick Call With Manager

Ah, the sacred pre-vacation server ritual! Nothing says "please don't crash while I'm gone" like a desperate group prayer to the uptime gods. These poor souls are performing the ancient IT sacrament of server-touching—a mystical ceremony where sysadmins transfer their life force into the hardware. "Stay alive until January, you temperamental pile of circuits. I've got eggnog to drink and I'm not debugging your tantrums remotely from my in-laws' house." The irony? The server will absolutely choose Christmas morning to have an existential crisis anyway.

Job description: "Must be expert in Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, Ansible, Argo, Python, Helm, Docker, Grafana, Vault, and whatever else we discover next week." Actual job: "Here's a Jenkins instance from 2013. Don't break it." The classic bait-and-switch of modern DevOps. They lure you in with promises of cutting-edge infrastructure, then hand you the digital equivalent of a museum artifact held together with duct tape and prayers. Six months in, you're still trying to figure out why production depends on a Perl script written by someone who left during the Obama administration.

Ah, the infinite recursion of corporate time tracking. You're spending so much time documenting your hours in Jira that you need to document the time spent documenting time... and then document that time too. It's the bureaucratic equivalent of a stack overflow, except your sanity crashes first. Eight years into my career and I've started estimating "Jira maintenance" as its own task. 2 hours per sprint just to update tickets that tell management what I'm doing instead of, you know, actually doing it. The real joke? Somewhere there's a product manager using this data to optimize workflows. Irony, thy name is enterprise software.

That tiny crack in the dam is all that stands between your company and a catastrophic flood of bad code decisions from 2012. Management keeps asking why you're "wasting time" fixing the crack instead of building that pointless new feature nobody asked for. Meanwhile, the intern just asked what "documentation" means.

Companies spending millions on fancy security programs only to have some exec use "admin/admin" as their credentials is the digital equivalent of installing a bank vault door on a cardboard box. The CISO builds this elaborate security fortress while some VP is basically leaving the keys under the doormat. And the best part? When the inevitable breach happens, guess who gets blamed? Not the genius who thought "admin" was a password that would stump hackers from 1995.

That smug little face says it all. The cat (labeled "Cursor AI") sits there with that self-satisfied grin while staring at the waffle ("The code that broke production") like it's about to devour the evidence. Nothing quite matches the special feeling of watching your teammate's cursor float around the screen in real-time as they confidently add that one magical line of code that brings down the entire system. "Trust me, this will fix it!" they say, right before Slack explodes with alerts and your phone starts having a seizure with PagerDuty notifications. But of course, this "didn't happen at your company." Just like how nobody ever pushed to main on Friday at 4:55 PM.