IT Unprofessional

People keep asking me how I got into IT. I got into IT because I was too socially awkward for sales and too impatient for engineering. In 2009, I was the only IT person at a 40-person startup. Everything was my fault. Server down? My fault. Email slow? My fault. Someone's laptop got a virus because they opened an email from their own mother? Also my fault, apparently. One day the CEO asked me why our internet was "acting slow." I told him it was probably DNS. I had no idea what DNS was. I just knew it was the answer to everything. He asked me to fix it. I told him I needed $8K in equipment and three weeks. I spent two weeks watching YouTube videos about DNS, bought $200 in equipment, and told him it was fixed. It wasn't. The internet was still slow. But nobody asked about it again because a month later the company ran out of money and shut down. I got hired at the next place and immediately told them our DNS was probably the problem. They believed me. That was 15 years ago. I'm now an IT Director at a Fortune 500 company. My entire career is built on the fact that I got lucky once and nobody's fact-checked me since. Last month someone asked me a technical question during a meeting and I just said "DNS" and everyone nodded and moved on. I'm convinced my entire C-suite reputation is based on a YouTube video from 2009 I watched while pretending to work.

HR informed me I had to conduct a mandatory cybersecurity seminar for all new hires. Normally I just email them a PDF from 2012 and mark them as compliant in the system. But our insurance provider required physical proof of an instructor-led session. I gathered 40 terrified employees in a conference room. My goal was to ensure none of them ever submitted an IT help desk ticket for as long as they worked here. I opened the presentation with a slide showing a stock photo of a house on fire. I told them this is what happens to the corporate network when you restart your computer without authorization. I explained that our entire infrastructure operates on a fragile ecosystem of asynchronous legacy tunneling. I said every time a user reboots a machine, it sends a localized EMP spike directly into the primary database. A girl from accounting raised her hand and asked what to do if her screen freezes. I told her she needs to wait for the CPU to naturally metabolize the data. I said forcing a shutdown is the equivalent of digital manslaughter. Then I moved to the topic of password security. I told them our new policy requires a 64-character password that must include a prime number, a zodiac sign, and a semicolon. I said passwords cannot be written down, stored in a manager, or committed to long-term memory. A guy from marketing asked how he's supposed to remember it. I told him security isn't supposed to be convenient, it's supposed to be agonizing. I spent the last 45 minutes explaining the dangers of opening browser tabs. I convinced them that every active tab drains exactly 4% of the company's total bandwidth. I said if anyone has more than 3 tabs open at once, they're actively participating in a localized denial of service attack. The room was dead silent. They all walked back to their desks like they were navigating a minefield. Help desk tickets are down 94% this week. Half the staff is too afraid to even turn their monitors on. I've spent the last 3 days watching documentaries about the bronze age collapse in absolute peace. Fear is the most cost-effective firewall on the market.

The executive team finally approved a $300K budget for a company-wide hardware refresh. The staff has been complaining for 3 years that their machines take 15 minutes to open a PDF. I was supposed to purchase 150 brand new laptops. I didn't do that. I went to a government surplus auction and bought 150 refurbished laptops from 2016 for $40K. They are thick, grey, and weigh about 8 pounds each. They look like they were designed to survive a nuclear winter. I took the remaining $260K and purchased high-end graphics cards, liquid cooling systems, and specialized motherboards. I used company funds to build an absolute monster of a computing cluster in my basement. I told accounting the components were for a hyper-converged failover network. I'm actually using it to run an open-source AI model that predicts AA baseball statistics for sports betting. When I distributed the heavy grey laptops to the staff, there was an immediate uproar. The Director of Sales came to my office and slammed his 8-pound laptop on my desk. He asked why I bought hardware that looks like it belongs on a submarine. I leaned back in my chair and sighed. I told him we're transitioning to a physical zero-trust architecture. I explained that modern slim laptops lack the necessary internal shielding to block ambient corporate espionage. I said these specific chassis are lined with a proprietary zinc alloy that prevents unauthorized Bluetooth siphoning. He asked why it takes 12 minutes to boot up. I told him it takes 12 minutes because the BIOS is running a military-grade cryptographic handshake with our cloud perimeter. He immediately backed down and apologized for questioning the encryption process. The entire company is now hauling around 8-pound concrete blocks. Meanwhile, my basement supercomputer successfully predicted 14 consecutive winning picks yesterday. I made $4K by 3 PM. The hardware refresh was a total success.

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Our new VP of Engineering sent out an email proposing we migrate all our legacy systems to Azure. He included a 40-page deck about cloud scalability and decentralized workflows. This was a direct threat to my existence. If we move to the cloud, my 2008 VBScript automations will instantly break. Worse, people might actually realize I don't know how to code in any modern language. I called an emergency meeting with the entire C-suite. I walked in carrying a massive binder filled with blank pieces of paper just for dramatic effect. I dropped the binder on the table and asked the VP of Engineering if he was familiar with geospatial packet fragmentation. He hesitated. He said he was generally familiar with packet loss. I laughed out loud. I told him packet loss is a child's problem. I explained that when you host proprietary data in a public cloud, it gets physically scattered across thousands of unregulated servers. I said Azure uses an algorithmic load balancer that frequently routes localized traffic through the Mariana Trench fiber-optic corridor. I looked directly at our legal counsel and said it's a massive liability. I told them if a single subpoena is issued during a data hop over international waters, we lose all sovereign intellectual property rights. The CEO turned pale. He asked the VP of Engineering if he'd considered the maritime legal implications of the migration. The VP looked like he was having a stroke. He tried to explain that the cloud doesn't actually work like that. I interrupted him and yelled that data doesn't care about his theoretical diagrams. I slapped my binder of blank paper and said I'd documented 400 instances of unauthorized maritime data hops from our competitors. The CEO immediately canceled the Azure contract. He promoted me to Senior Director of Data Sovereignty and gave me a 20% raise. I spent the rest of the afternoon looking out the window and listening to smooth jazz. The cloud is just somebody else's computer. And I prefer keeping the company hostage on mine.

The board of directors decided they wanted a physical tour of our data center this morning. They wanted to see where their $10M annual infrastructure investment was going. This was a massive logistical problem for me. Server Room A isn't a data center. Server Room A is my personal sanctuary. I have a $4K espresso machine, a memory foam mattress topper, and a 75-inch OLED television in there. I spend 6 hours a day in Server Room A playing Runescape while my 2008 automation scripts run the company. I had exactly 20 minutes to rebrand a luxury bachelor pad into a mission-critical tech hub. When the executives walked in, the room was completely dark except for the glow of the OLED screen. The screen was displaying a looping 4K screensaver of the Matrix code. The chairman asked why there was a mattress on the floor next to the main server rack. I told him sometimes I have to sleep in there while pulling 48-hour shifts. The CFO pointed to the stainless steel espresso machine sitting on my desk. She asked why we had a commercial coffee maker plugged into a dedicated server circuit. I didn't break eye contact. I told her it was a state-of-the-art thermal liquid cooling intake system called La Marzocco. I said it utilizes high-pressure steam to regulate the ambient temperature of our localized edge nodes. I pressed a button and the machine dispensed a perfect double espresso shot. I told them it was extracting toxic condensation from the mainframe. I drank the shot right in front of them to demonstrate my commitment to environmental sustainability. The CEO literally gasped. He told the board I was putting my own body on the line to keep the servers running. They ended the tour early because they felt they were interrupting highly sensitive technical operations. I locked the door behind them, switched the Matrix code back to my PlayStation input. Executive oversight is an illusion. If you dim the lights and use the word kinetic, you can get away with anything.

Our CEO read an article in Harvard Business Review about digital transformation and panicked. He told me we needed to modernize our tech stack or risk obsolescence. We sell industrial lubricants. Our tech stack is perfectly fine. But you don't tell a CEO that his HBR article is wrong. You tell him he's a visionary and then you spend company money to prove it. He asked me to hire a tier 1 consulting firm to audit our entire infrastructure. I signed a $600K contract with a massive global consulting agency. They sent over a team of six 23-year-olds wearing matching fleece vests. These kids had degrees in organizational psychology and absolutely no idea how a server works. They set up a war room in our main conference center. For 3 months, they interviewed my department about our agile workflows. I don't have an agile workflow. I have a series of bash scripts from 2008 that run automatically at midnight. When they asked to see my architecture diagrams, I drew a circle on a whiteboard. I told them we operate on a decentralized monolithic closed-loop ecosystem. I used the word ecosystem 14 times in a single hour. The lead consultant furiously typed everything I said into his iPad. I spent the next 12 weeks napping in my massage chair while they analyzed our pipeline. Yesterday, they presented their final findings to the executive board. They delivered a 150-page slide deck. The first 149 pages were just bar charts showing how much data we process. The final page was their strategic recommendation. They recommended that we maintain our current closed-loop ecosystem because it represents peak structural integrity. They literally charged us $600K to tell the CEO that my 2008 bash scripts are state-of-the-art. The CEO was thrilled. He thanked me for building such a robust foundation. He gave me a $35K performance bonus for passing the audit with zero critical vulnerabilities. Consulting is just paying someone else a fortune to take the blame or confirm your bias. I'm taking my bonus and buying a vintage 1980s arcade cabinet for my living room.

@chip_coulant thank you for your service

Have you ever stood between humanity and an endless spinning loading wheel? I have. At 3:17 a.m., a network switch responsible for serving short-form video began dropping packets. If it failed completely, millions of people would be forced to sit quietly with their own thoughts. I could not allow that. I traced the fault to a damaged fiber cable behind a rack containing 600 terabytes of strangers pointing at text above their heads. The cable was bent and pulsing, like a tiny glass artery carrying dance trends and incorrect financial advice. I removed it carefully and installed a fresh line. The link lights turned green. Data began moving again. Somewhere, a 34-year-old man resumed watching a teenager explain which kitchen appliances are toxic. A woman in bed received part 7 of a story whose first 6 parts contained no information. The crisis had passed. I zip-tied the old cable and placed it in the disposal bin. Then I returned to my rounds. The world believes the internet is wireless. I know it is mostly wires carrying videos that are making us all dumber.

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Our corporate policy dictates that we replace executive mobile devices every 24 months. This means I have a closet containing 400 perfectly functional older generation smartphones. HR asked me when I was going to contact an e-waste recycling vendor to dispose of them. I told them we can't recycle these devices yet. I explained that the lithium-ion matrices need to undergo a prolonged biometric quarantine. I said we have proprietary company data baked into the deep silicon cache that takes years to evaporate. None of that means anything. Data doesn't evaporate. But HR stopped asking questions immediately. Instead of recycling them, I mounted all 400 phones to a massive piece of plywood in the basement. I connected them to a dedicated power supply and wired them into a segregated VLAN. I wrote a script that forces every single phone to continuously stream a YouTube channel. The YouTube channel just plays 10-hour loops of rain sounds. I own the YouTube channel. I'm generating ad revenue from 400 concurrent U.S.-based viewers. The phones run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. My localized click-farm is currently netting me about $3K a month in passive income. Last week, the VP of Ops wandered into the basement and saw the glowing wall of screens. He asked me what on earth he was looking at. I didn't even blink. I told him it was a distributed mobile redundancy matrix. I explained that we were stress-testing our cloud infrastructure by simulating high-density mobile traffic. He called it an absolute masterclass in proactive load balancing. He actually took a picture of my click-farm to show the board how innovative we are. The company is paying the electricity bill to power my personal monetization engine. I'm going to use this month's ad revenue to buy a new Herman Miller Aeron chair. I deserve it.

@chip_coulant thank you for your service

Have you ever held 1,000,000 unread marketing newsletters in the palm of your hand? I have, and it weighs exactly 2.4 pounds. A solid-state drive near the main exhaust vent started throwing predictive failure errors around midnight. If I let it die, several major retail chains would lose the ability to email you “LAST CHANCE” about a mattress sale that ends every Sunday. I slid the dying slab of silicon out of the array, feeling the residual warmth of corporate desperation through my antistatic gloves. Inside that drive were abandoned carts, loyalty-point reminders, and at least 40,000 emails asking people if they were “still thinking it over.” I replaced it with a cold, blank drive and snapped the retaining clip into place. The lights synchronized. Somewhere, a divorced man in Ohio received 15% off patio furniture. The global supply of spam was safe once again. I tossed the dead drive into the shred bin, a silent graveyard for expired promo codes and brands that called themselves “disruptive.” Then I continued my rounds through the cold, empty halls. Nobody knows my name. But every time you unsubscribe and somehow get another email tomorrow, just know I’m down here keeping the dream alive.

I hate open-plan offices with a burning passion. Our company moved to a modern glass-walled headquarters last year to promote transparency. Transparency is just a corporate buzzword for micromanagement. I can't maintain my daily 2-hour afternoon nap schedule if anyone walking by can see me drooling on my keyboard. So I submitted a purchase order for $45K in military-grade acoustic paneling and copper mesh. The CFO asked why I needed to completely wrap my office in heavy industrial materials. I told him I was constructing a SCIF. I said a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility was federally mandated for our upcoming data migration. I explained that modern corporate espionage utilizes acoustic keylogging. I told him our competitors could theoretically recreate our passwords just by listening to the sound of my keystrokes vibrating off the glass walls. He went pale and approved the $45K immediately. The contractors finished the installation on Tuesday. My office is now a pitch-black, soundproof void. It blocks all cellular signals and Wi-Fi interference. When you close the heavy steel door, it seals with an airtight hiss. It's the quietest place on the entire Eastern seaboard. I brought in a memory foam camping cot and a weighted blanket. I lock the door at 1:00 PM every single day. I enter a state of deep, uninterrupted REM sleep that most billionaires would envy. If anyone knocks, they can't be heard. If anyone calls my cell phone, it goes straight to voicemail because the copper mesh acts as a Faraday cage. When I emerge at 3:30 PM, I tell people I was in deep localized meditation to visualize our network topology. The HR Director said my dedication to mental focus is inspiring. She has no idea I'm sleeping in my slacks while making $96 an hour. I'm never leaving this company. My office is essentially a high-yield sensory deprivation chamber.

The most valuable asset in corporate America isn't capital or intellectual property. It's calendar space. If you leave blank spaces on your Outlook calendar, middle managers will fill them with useless status meetings. Two years ago, I realized I was spending 15 hours a week listening to people talk in circles using corporate buzzwords. So I went into our active directory and created a phantom contractor. His name is Elias Vanguard. His title is Senior Cloud Migration Specialist. I gave Elias a stock photo headshot and a very vague bio about his background in logistics. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I schedule a 3-hour working session with Elias. I mark the meetings as critical infrastructure alignment. No one ever schedules over a critical infrastructure alignment meeting. For 9 hours a week, my status shows as red and In a Meeting. People think I'm deep in the trenches configuring our AWS architecture. In reality, I'm sitting in my office watching serial killer documentaries. Sometimes I send emails to Elias and CC the executive team. I tell Elias to make sure the packet routing is optimized for Q3. Then I log into Elias's account and reply that the nodes are fully stabilized. The CEO loves Elias. He recently asked if we could bring Elias on as a full-time employee. I told him Elias prefers the freedom of contracting and is currently operating out of a rural cabin in Montana. I said Elias works strictly asynchronously due to satellite internet latency. The CEO respected that. He said Elias is exactly the kind of untethered maverick this company needs. Last month, I authorized a $2K training stipend for Elias to attend a virtual cybersecurity seminar. I used the money to buy myself a new set of golf clubs. I'm currently a 12 handicap. By the end of summer, I expect to break 80. I owe it all to Elias.

The CEO called a town hall to announce our transition to a modern digital workspace. He wants to replace our entire fleet of 2020 Dell laptops with brand new equipment. He framed it as an investment in employee productivity. I immediately recognized it as an existential threat to my peace and quiet. Deploying 400 new machines means dealing with 400 unique human beings. It means migrating local files for people who save all their passwords on a sticky note. I scheduled an emergency closed-door meeting with the executive board. I told them a hardware refresh right now would be corporate suicide. The CFO asked why giving people faster computers is a bad idea. I told him we are currently operating in a state of chronological hardware obfuscation. I explained that modern ransomware is explicitly designed to exploit the silicon architecture of modern processors. By keeping our workforce on hardware that is 6 years old, we are technically invisible to threat actors. I said the laptops are so bogged down with legacy cache files that a virus physically cannot execute its payload in time. Our inefficiency is our greatest defense mechanism. The CEO looked deeply concerned and asked if upgrading would expose our intellectual property. I nodded and whispered the phrase "silicon-level perimeter degradation." They immediately canceled the hardware order. They thanked me for prioritizing our data sovereignty over flashy aesthetics. I spent the rest of the day in the server room watching a 3 part documentary on the history of the vending machine. Sometimes doing absolutely nothing is the highest form of cybersecurity.

Our insurance provider forced us to undergo a third-party cybersecurity audit. They sent a guy named Kevin who carried a clipboard and spoke entirely in compliance frameworks. Kevin spent his first morning asking for our active directory topology. I do not have an active directory topology. My active directory is a chaotic swamp of deprecated user profiles from 2017. I told Kevin that mapping the network creates a comprehensive blueprint for state-sponsored threat actors. I explained that we utilize a Schrödinger network philosophy. I told him the infrastructure exists in a state of quantum superposition where it is both perfectly secure and completely undocumented. By refusing to map the network, we ensure that if we are ever breached, the hackers will be just as confused as we are. Kevin looked at his clipboard and asked how we handle routine patch management. I leaned over my desk and told him we employ a strategy of Darwinian software evolution. I said we let the applications fight it out, and only the strongest legacy code survives. He asked if I was joking. I asked him if he was prepared to accept liability for interrupting an organic security ecosystem. He crossed something off on his clipboard and moved on to physical security. I took him to the data center and showed him an empty rack cabinet. I told him it was an air-gapped honeypot designed to trap localized radio frequency interference. He just nodded, completely broken, and went back to his car. We passed the audit with a conditional green light. If you come into my dojo I'm going to confuse you with buzzwords and fake urgency until you leave.

We currently have exactly 0 open tickets in our IT helpdesk queue. The CEO praised my department at the all-hands meeting this morning for our unparalleled resolution speed. He said we're setting a new standard for operational excellence. We aren't setting a standard for anything. I just wrote a script in 2011 that instantly replies to every new support ticket with a terrifying automated response. If someone submits a ticket saying their printer isn't working, the system fires back a 600-word email. It asks them to confirm if they've inadvertently breached the localized firewall sub-net. It demands they verify their IP configuration against the mandatory compliance registry. It includes a bolded warning that unauthorized peripheral modifications carry a $10K penalty under federal data laws. At the bottom, it asks them to fill out a 14-page PDF detailing their recent keystroke logs. Or, they can click a button that says the issue resolved itself. Every single person clicks the button. They'd rather buy their own printer at Best Buy than fill out that form. People are fundamentally terrified of breaking corporate rules they don't understand. My entire job security is based on weaponizing that fear. I spend 5 hours a day watching restoration videos on YouTube while the company hums along on pure anxiety. Last month an intern actually tried to fill out the 14-page PDF. I just deleted it and told his manager he was exhibiting risky cyber behavior. The intern was reassigned to the mailroom. Uptime is just a measure of how thoroughly you've intimidated the end users.

HR announced a mandatory company-wide offsite retreat for "building culture". They rented a ropes course 45 minutes outside the city. The itinerary included trust falls, emotional intelligence workshops, and a catered sandwich buffet. I would rather walk barefoot across a floor made of Lego bricks. I emailed the VP of HR and told her I couldn't attend. She pushed back and said executive presence is mandatory for team morale. I called her via Microsoft Teams and turned my camera on while sitting in Server Room A. I held up a tangle of blue ethernet cables and looked incredibly stressed. I told her I was currently mitigating a cascading DNS fragmentation event. I explained that our primary BGP routing tables were experiencing asynchronous drift. If I left the perimeter for even 10 minutes, the entire payroll system could revert to a localized backup from 1998. She gasped and apologized for distracting me from mission-critical operations. She told me to stay on-site and do whatever it takes to protect the infrastructure. I hung up, locked the door, and turned on the biometric stabilization pod I bought with company funds. I ordered $150 of sushi on the corporate card under the billing code for emergency vendor consultation. I spent the next 8 hours in zero-gravity mode playing a vintage Gameboy emulator on my phone. I heard the retreat was a disaster because it rained and the sandwich meat got warm. Strategic isolation is the ultimate corporate superpower.

I have a recurring calendar block every day from 1 PM to 3 PM. It's publicly visible to the entire company as a database defragmentation period. I have strict instructions that I'm not to be disturbed during this window under any circumstances. I told the executive team that defragmenting the core CRM servers requires my absolute, unbroken concentration. I explained that a single distraction could corrupt our entire sales history. They treat that 2-hour window like it's a sacred religious ceremony. Nobody sends me Slack messages. Nobody emails me. People literally whisper when they walk past the server room door. I'm not defragmenting anything. Database defragmentation hasn't been a manual process since the late 90s. I have an air mattress shoved behind the secondary rack enclosures. The servers produce a gentle, rhythmic hum that acts as perfect white noise. The ambient temperature is a crisp 68 degrees. I have a sleeping bag rated for sub-zero temperatures that I bought with a corporate card. I categorized it as emergency thermal protection gear for catastrophic cooling failures. I sleep for exactly 2 hours every single afternoon. When I emerge at 3 PM, I look exhausted. I rub my eyes and tell everyone we successfully avoided a catastrophic partition collapse. The VP of Marketing always brings me a coffee and thanks me for my service. I make $200K a year to take a nap in a high-tech closet. Corporate survival is just managing the illusion of effort.

The external compliance auditors showed up at 9 AM this morning. They wanted to review our data retention policies and inspect the physical server racks. I can't let them look at the physical server racks. Server rack 4 is currently housing my personal collection of vintage Scotch and acting as a humidor for my cigars. I met the lead auditor in the lobby and refused to shake his hand. I told him we were currently operating under a Level 4 bio-digital quarantine. He looked confused and asked what that meant. I whispered that we'd detected a polymorphic malware strain attempting to cross the air-gapped perimeter. I explained that any external hardware brought into the building could act as a carrier vector. I asked him if his clipboard was RFID shielded. It was a wooden clipboard. He said no. I took a massive step back and told him he was risking an asynchronous cascade failure just by breathing near the elevators. I said if he proceeded, his firm would be legally liable for the imminent DNS collapse. He put his wooden clipboard in his briefcase, and walked out of the building. The CFO called me 20 minutes later panicking about a failed audit. I told him the auditors lacked the infrastructure to interface with our localized security protocols. I said they were essentially bringing a knife to a quantum cryptography fight. He authorized me to self-certify the audit for this quarter. I spent the rest of the day in the server room smoking a $40 cigar. Compliance is just a game of who can use the scariest vocabulary first.

Our board of directors is obsessed with business continuity planning. They asked me what'd happen to our data if a natural disaster leveled the headquarters. I told them our current redundancy posture was completely inadequate. I said we needed a mobile, geo-independent disaster recovery node. I explained it had to be a fully self-contained unit capable of going off-grid at a moment's notice. They authorized a $150K capital expenditure to build the node. I took the money and bought a 2022 Airstream travel trailer. I parked it on a leased lot near a lake 4 hours away. I mounted a satellite internet dish to the roof and put an old decommissioned server rack in the closet. I told the board the node was fully operational and required monthly on-site maintenance. I drive up to the lake every 3rd Thursday of the month. I spend 4 days fishing for largemouth bass while technically clocked in. If anyone asks why I'm unavailable, I tell them I'm running asynchronous failover simulations. I explain that testing the satellite uplink latency requires me to be completely isolated from the primary grid. Our CFO actually visited the unit once to audit the investment. I made sure to have cables running everywhere and a dashboard displaying raw network traffic on a loop. He looked at the leather seating and the panoramic windows. I told him the luxurious interior was necessary to prevent psychological fatigue during a protracted crisis scenario. He nodded and agreed that operator morale is critical during a total infrastructure collapse. He has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. Next summer I'm going to propose a secondary node in the mountains.