Pirate Gold
There is a beach, and on that beach is a crab. It is night, and the crab is coming out to look for food. It scuttles across the sand and up a salt-pitted wood plank. A few feet up the plank is a gaping hole, torn out of the ship of which the plank is a part. The crab enters the hole, unfazed by the obvious age of the wreck. It smells food. It moves swiftly across what used to be a wall, ignoring the corroded gold coins stuck in the cracks between the boards — crabs have no use for gold. With a single-minded focus it travels over a spilled barrel of biscuits, now a decomposing pile of dirt and mold, down a long stretch of hall and over the broken hinge of a small doorway.
The crab shows just as little interest in the next obstacle it mounts — a journal detailing the final decision to turn towards shore in the face of a tropical storm and angry rivals. Although waterproofing has saved the entries and the dates, even if blessed with the twin gifts of night vision and literacy the crab could not read them, it is so dark. The crab, instead, is focused on the food source it can smell just in front of it. It crawls under the waterstained hat on the ground: a tricorn affair stuffed with feathers. Finally it reaches the corpse of Pirate Captain Thomas Keanes, and begins happily munching on his cheek. Keanes is not dead of starvation like most of his crew (whose bodies are scattered around the tiny island and have already been devoured by the crab and its kin), but instead is held to his ship by a thick crossbeam passing through his gut. The rupture in his abdominal cavity drained most of the fluid from his body years ago, and the remaining flesh has been cured by the salt air. Keanes’s archrival, Gerard DuVaune, is rotting on an island about fifty miles to the west, wrecked by the same storm, although DuVaune’s ship does not contain any gold.
The crab gnaws through a tendon in Keanes’s face, and his jaw falls open in a skeletal grin.
Deep in a chilled room somewhere in Arizona, servers clack in protest at the unfamiliar paradigm being forced upon them. Several hundred miles away at a desk in a San Fran office, an exasperated sysadmin swears at them. He has inherited a legacy enterprise system that was maintained by his predecessor without oversight for 8 years. Now, the one man who understood the company’s systems has given notice, and the new sysadmin has been poached from another SV firm to come clean up the mess.
Documentation amounts to a bunch of scattered Post-it notes tacked onto monitors or fallen down behind bookshelves, some eclectic comments sprinkled throughout mostly-deprecated codebases, a handful of esoteric README.txts and a knowledgetransfer.docx file which the previous tech clearly hadn’t felt like completing. Right now he is struggling just to access their production environment, a bug which would have sent half the employees at his old job into conniptions. But a mere 4 days have been enough to fully demolish his old concept of “catastrophe.”
“We’ll be onboarding more people soon. What we want you to do is just get comfortable with the system, and be prepared to bring our new hires up to speed. I’ll be meeting with you weekly just to make sure you’re not running into any problems. If you need anything reach out to me, or you can contact [old tech] at his personal email but he’s EST now so he might not respond right away. I asked him to put together a summary of our operations here for you, so everything should be pretty clear. Get settled in and come talk to me as soon as you have a handle on everything. We’ll be updating some of our services in about a month so you’ll want to be ready to handle pushing that to production and maintaining security on our patches. I’ll intro you to the team in question later. We’re anticipating a smooth transition here, so again please come to me immediately if anything isn’t crystal clear.”
That had been day 1. His initial flurry of questions had come about an hour later, after he had taken a quick look at the machines. The response: irritated, unhelpful, filled with an unspoken implication that he should just figure it out by himself, somehow. Now, on day 4, he’s contemplating resigning. He is the only current employee at this marketing company without a marketing background, and he is profoundly lonely. He is no longer devoting much of his attention to the job, instead posting on various sysadmin forums about his misfortune, and getting in response a steady stream of horror stories from grizzled veterans of corporate incompetence.
Some idle browsing takes him to a flashed backup image of one of their servers, and he manages to eventually match credentials from a notecard left in the drawer to the server image. Inside, he finds production code from two months ago. A quick diff between the old version and the current iteration reveals few changes — except for deleted comments, of which there are many. As he starts reading them, the engineer finally understands some of what the machines around him are actually doing. These comments are filling crucial gaps in his knowledge. Previously arcane invocations and impenetrable thickets of variable references begin to make sense. For some reason, this stings most of all. Did the old sysadmin actually delete documentation before turning over the system? What kind of corporate sabotage bullshit was this? The guy wanted to make his absence hurt, so he just threw a landmine at the guy who came after him, was that it?
The new sysadmin still doesn’t really know what’s going on, but he knows enough to bluff to his supervisor next week. He goes home fuming, but not ready to resign quite yet. He will, at the very least, stick around for the next couple of hires so that somebody else doesn’t have to go through the same process he did.
Me: so u want me to give direct access to our remote offices | 10:31
ralph: right. it doesnt make sense for ppl in st louis or philidelphia to be going through you every time they want to update a date or smth | 10:33
Me: this is not something I want to do without implementing 2fa or similar | 10:34
ralph: sry we dont really have time/capacity to overhaul security right now. once we fill out ur team we will look at making those kinds of changes | 10:38
which we have been working on. i actually have an interview w/ potential new hire this wk | 10:39
Me: I feel like I have time to get it done | 10:41
ralph: and if smth comes up in the middle of implementation ur our single point of failure. appreciate ur enthusiasm but not gonna risk it | 10:43
you’ve been a real trooper abt this situation. we did not anticipate it taking this long to fill out our it team but i think this guy will be a good fit | 10:45
but meanwhile we need to distribute access to this code | 10:46
Me: I can scrape together a quick+dirty solution just giving remote workers limited admin access and then build out something more robust once we have the bodies for it | 10:48
I’ve only been working here for a few months myself. I haven’t met most of these remote guys | 10:49
chances I can get some meetings with them to discuss use cases? | 10:49
ralph: ill get you in touch with someone remote | 11:08
probably paul, in st louis. he’s the one who’s most excited about this functionality | 11:09
Me: alright, I’ll talk with him and sketch out implementation details. but we should plan to revisit this problem asap | 11:12
ralph: excellent | 11:18
you mind coming upstairs for a few minutes? | 4:28
Me: omw | 4:28
“So I have a couple of things to go over with you. First of all, I thought you should know, I’m going to be promoted to COO.”
“Shit, grats, man.”
“Thank you. They’ll make the official announcement in about a week, but I figured you ought to know ahead of time since it will impact your workflow. I won’t be involved with your work as directly anymore. However, we’re not leaving you high and dry. I’ve signed a contract with a new guy who will be taking over some of my old duties, but more explicitly connected with the IT department.”
“Hold on, you’re hiring someone over top of me?”
“You’ll be getting a promotion as well, and commensurate pay raise. The intention is not to lock you into your current role, but to restructure the department from an HR standpoint.”
“I don’t care about the titles, I just don’t want to have to go beg some newbie manager to sign off on my firmware upgrades.”
“You’ll be managing technical and implementation details pretty much solo after this. The vision is for the new guy to be responsible for interfacing between IT and our marketing and analytics departments. He’ll be the go-between, essentially. It will take some administrative busywork off your desk and let you focus on the tech side of things.”
“Which one of us is heading the department?”
“You’ll be technical lead, he’ll be project lead.”
“So he is. You’re hiring a new guy into my promotion path or what?”
“Again, you’ll be receiving a promotion and co-”
“Fuck’s sake, at least tell me you plan on hiring some more techs finally.”
“That’s going to be his first priority, is filling desks next to yours. And all of those new hires will answer directly to you, not him.”
“Alright, well, look, congratulations on the promotion, Ralph. But you’ll excuse me if I say this looks like I’m getting tossed in the fuckin basement and you guys are throwing away the key. I’ve been working here over two years now, and the first personnel change in all that time is a guy coming in over top of me?”
“As soon as you have a few sysadmins working for you you’ll realize that it’s much more of a symbiotic relationship between you two. You’ll have different spheres of authority, right? Consider it a lateral hire.”
“I consider it a dick up my ass. But if you’re really pulling in new engineers I guess I can’t complain too much. It’s about fuckin time.”
“I made sure you got a cozy package as part of the restructuring. I think you’re going to be happy with it. Don’t worry, I’d never leave you high and dry after everything you’ve done for us the past couple years. You’ve singlehandedly kept this company running at certain points.”
“Don’t I fuckin know it.”
/home/admin/Desktop/Trash/resignation_letter.docx
Ralph:
Fuck this fucking bullshit, man. I’m fucking done. I quit. Malcolm is a retard who can barely write an email and I haven’t seen a single fucking new hire since he walked his dumb ass in here. The only thing he’s done is increase my workload, since now I have to fucking babysit him as well as everything else. Every time we get a request from analytics or whatever he never collects any relevant information and I have to go back and ask them myself. Fucking asshole just sits there playing fuckins olitaire and trying to tell me how to do my job. Fuck him.
That’s not why I’m quitting, though. I’m quitting because it’s been five fucking years since I sent you my first proposal to revamp system security and you shot me down, and when we had that data breach last year I’M the one who got shit for it. I’m quitting because it’s been fucking months since I had an original thought, all I fucking do is push buttons on a remote server bank and field dumbass requests from idiot marketers with no fucking clue what our capacities even are, and take shit whenever an idiot in analytics overpromises to a new client and our system can’t actually do what they said it could because that functionality is dependent on a defunct library that we haven’t rewritten because I still don’t understand what the fuck it’s being used for and I’m the only one who understands anything around here.
I’m quitting because I’m tired of being the single point of failure for an entire multimillion dollar firm. It’s fucking stresful man. I wake up in fucking cold sweats because I can’t remember if I set the production update to run tonight and I end up checking into the servers from home at 2am just to make sure I didn’t explode every service in our offering. I’m quitting because I started accessing root from home and nobody asked any questions or even noticed. I’m quitting because as much shit as I got for the data fiasco, I was the only one who gave half a teaspoon of runny birdshit for best practices before that, and when the st louis office leaked 20k corporate records it was obvious they hadn’t even been trying to maintain security. I’m quitting because this company is ass, it’s total garbage and I hate it. I hate working here. I hate my job. I hate what I do. I hate it here so much I actually can’t remember why I started working in this field in the first place. I don’t fucking need this shit. I have savings, I have bonds. I made fucking bank off of crypto. I’m gonna just chill the fuck out for a year or two and maybe move to Malta or something but if I stay in this office I’m gonna die. Go fuck yourself, asshole.
P.S. Tell Mallory I think she’s a bitch
— O.N.
