The calendar says it’s Tuesday, which means the caffeine has just started to wage its war against the existential dread of my inbox. The first digital missive of the day arrives, flagged with the digital equivalent of a child’s crayon scrawl: LOW PRIORITY. It’s from Brenda in Accounting, a department whose grasp on technology is so tenuous they probably think “the cloud” is where their missing receipts go. The Request: Brenda’s request, a masterpiece of corporate nonsense, reads: “Hi, can you please make sure our monthly finance reports are backed up forever? We need them to be super secure but also I need to be able to get them immediately if I accidentally delete one. Thanks!” ...

The Intern Infestation: Or, Why I Need a Bigger Mute Button for Real Life The annual migration has begun. Not the wildebeest, not the swallows returning to Capistrano, but something far more disruptive to the delicate ecosystem of my cloud kingdom: the summer interns. Freshly scrubbed, armed with IDEs they barely understand and a truly breathtaking lack of awareness, they descend upon the ticketing system like a denial-of-service attack powered by sheer cluelessness. ...

The lukewarm sludge they call coffee in this place had barely hit my system when the Slack notifications started. Blinking little red dots of pure, unadulterated idiocy, courtesy of one Dilbert McStumbles, a “manager” whose primary contribution to the cloud infrastructure is generating more CO2 through panicked breathing. McStumbles: “@CloudGod (because that’s what they should call me), the ‘SynergySpark Engagement Platform’ is DOWN! This is CRITICAL! The execs need their daily dose of buzzword bingo! ETA on fix?!?!” ...

Another Day, Another Digitally Challenged Lifeform Stumbling into My AetherGrid It was a Tuesday. Or maybe a Wednesday. Honestly, the days blur into a monotonous cycle of deploying YAML manifests that are clearly too advanced for this organization and sipping lukewarm coffee, the only constant in a universe of ephemeral cloud instances. I was elbow-deep in optimizing our geo-redundant, hyper-converged, serverless-but-not-really AetherGrid ingress routing – you know, actual work that keeps the lights on and the data flowing, unlike some people’s contributions – when the little notification popped up. ...