Lazy IT Guy

The annual enterprise software licensing renewal process is my absolute favorite time of year because it gives me total, unchecked authority to vanish from the office for days at a time. Our primary cloud storage vendor originally quoted us a 15% price increase, which caused the entire finance department to go into a panic. The CFO begged me to negotiate with the vendor's enterprise sales team, authorizing me to use any means necessary to secure our previous rate. I updated my calendar with a 3-day block titled "Hostile Off-Site Infrastructure Negotiations" and set my Slack status to the skull emoji 💀 I actually spent those 3 days at a golf resort, completely ignoring all corporate communications while I perfected my backswing on the company dime. The vendor's enterprise sales rep is a guy named Todd who needs to hit his quota, so I knew he'd eventually cave. While I was enjoying some lobster mac & cheese at the clubhouse, I wrote 1 highly aggressive email to Todd. I told him our internal security audits had revealed critical vulnerabilities in his company's data architecture, and we were actively preparing to migrate our entire payload to his biggest competitor. Exactly 12 minutes later, Todd practically broke down in my inbox, apologizing profusely and offering a brand new, highly discounted 3-year contract that saved our company $40k. Two days later I returned to work, walked directly into the CFO's office, and slammed the signed vendor contract onto his desk. I told him I'd spent the last 72 hours locked in a windowless boardroom, ruthlessly dismantling the vendor's leverage until they surrendered to our fiscal demands. The CFO was so grateful that he didn't notice my deep tan and personally thanked me for my relentless dedication. My reputation as a ruthless, highly effective corporate operator is entirely built on sending 1 email every 3 days while drinking cocktails by a beautifully manicured putting green. As long as you generate a piece of paper that says you saved the company money, the executive board will never question you.

HR cornered me by the elevators yesterday and announced that they'd assigned me a summer intern from an Ivy League computer science program. I recognized this as an existential threat to my carefully balanced ecosystem of extreme laziness and unregulated true-crime binge-watching during working hours. The kid showed up at 9:00 AM wearing a suit and tie, eager to learn, and holding a custom-built mechanical keyboard that cost more than my first car. He started asking questions about our server architecture, poking around my automated ticket queues, and suggesting we migrate our entire infrastructure to something "more modern" I knew I had to break his spirit, or he'd discover that my entire job consists of 3 automated scripts. I led him down into the freezing depths of the primary server room, walked him to the furthest, darkest corner, and pointed to 1 unlabelled black box with a blinking red LED. I put my hand on his shoulder, lowered my voice to a deadpan whisper, and told him that this box was the primary cryptographic handshake node for our international banking perimeter. I explained that we were currently experiencing extreme sub-atomic thermal degradation, and if that red light ever blinked faster than 1 time per second, the entire corporate treasury would automatically vaporize. He looked at the box with terror in his eyes, swallowed hard, and asked what he should do if the blinking accelerated. I handed him a disconnected analog telephone from 1998, told him it was a direct hardline to the FBI cyber-crimes division, and instructed him to guard the node with his life. I locked the server room door from the outside, walked back to my desk, and spent the next 6 hours browsing a Frontgate catalog. I occasionally checked the security cameras just to watch him standing rigidly at attention in the freezing cold, staring at a totally useless hardware router from a defunct telecom company. At 4:45 PM, I finally unlocked the door, walked in with a solemn expression, and told him the thermal degradation had stabilized thanks to his vigilance. He was completely exhausted and practically begged me to assign him to something less critical for the rest of his internship. He didn't want the responsibility. I graciously agreed to reassign him to the highly tedious, perfectly harmless task of untangling and cataloging 400 spare ethernet cables in the basement supply closet. I've successfully neutralized the intern threat, protected the absolute secrecy of my automated empire, and earned a reputation as an intense, uncompromising mentor. If you give an ambitious kid a fake crisis to manage, they'll be far too traumatized to ever look closely at what you actually do all day.

The absolute worst thing to happen to corporate IT in the last decade is the sudden, inescapable obsession with integrating AI into every single mundane business process. Our CEO just returned from a 3-day executive retreat in Silicon Valley, completely intoxicated by buzzwords and demanding that my department implement a localized generative AI model by the end of the week. Mind you, we are the IT department, not a frontier lab. He called an emergency all-hands meeting to announce that we were transitioning to a bleeding-edge, machine-learning paradigm that'd "take us into the future" He looked directly at me during the presentation, confidently stating that the IT department was already hard at work building an internal neural network to predict customer purchasing habits. I had absolutely no intention of doing 40 hours of highly complex machine learning engineering just so the executive board could feel like they were innovating. Instead, I spent exactly 20 minutes writing a basic landing page with a sleek, futuristic dark mode interface and a massive, glowing blue orb in the center of the screen. I connected the search bar to an outdated Bash script from 2008 that essentially just functions as a random number generator attached to a database of pre-approved corporate buzzwords. When the CEO came to my office for a private demonstration this morning, I handed him the keyboard and told him he was interfacing directly with our new quantum-heuristic prediction matrix. He typed in a query asking the AI how we should optimize our Q3 marketing strategy in the midwestern demographic sector. The script processed the input, spun the glowing blue orb for exactly 22 seconds to simulate heavy processing load, and spat out 1 heavily randomized sentence. The screen declared that the company must leverage holistic paradigm shifts to maximize asynchronous bandwidth alignment. The CEO literally gasped, pulled out his iPhone to take a picture of the monitor, and whispered that it was brilliant. He sent an email to the entire company, branding it as our proprietary digital visionary and strictly forbidding anyone from questioning its output. I'm currently being praised as a master architect of machine learning, and my department budget was just increased by $75k to accommodate server maintenance for the new system. I plan to use that entire budget increase to install a commercial-grade espresso machine in the server room and hire a local contractor to soundproof the walls. Corporate executives don't actually want advanced technological solutions. They just want a shiny, glowing box that validates the meaningless business-slop they read on Twitter.

The absolute worst thing to happen to corporate IT in the last decade is the sudden, inescapable obsession with integrating AI into every single mundane business process. Our CEO just returned from a 3-day executive retreat in Silicon Valley, completely intoxicated by buzzwords and demanding that my department implement a localized generative AI model by the end of the week. Mind you, we are the IT department, not a frontier lab. He called an emergency all-hands meeting to announce that we were transitioning to a bleeding-edge, machine-learning paradigm that'd "take us into the future" He looked directly at me during the presentation, confidently stating that the IT department was already hard at work building an internal neural network to predict customer purchasing habits. I had absolutely no intention of doing 40 hours of highly complex machine learning engineering just so the executive board could feel like they were innovating. Instead, I spent exactly 20 minutes writing a basic landing page with a sleek, futuristic dark mode interface and a massive, glowing blue orb in the center of the screen. I connected the search bar to an outdated Bash script from 2008 that essentially just functions as a random number generator attached to a database of pre-approved corporate buzzwords. When the CEO came to my office for a private demonstration this morning, I handed him the keyboard and told him he was interfacing directly with our new quantum-heuristic prediction matrix. He typed in a query asking the AI how we should optimize our Q3 marketing strategy in the midwestern demographic sector. The script processed the input, spun the glowing blue orb for exactly 22 seconds to simulate heavy processing load, and spat out 1 heavily randomized sentence. The screen declared that the company must leverage holistic paradigm shifts to maximize asynchronous bandwidth alignment. The CEO literally gasped, pulled out his iPhone to take a picture of the monitor, and whispered that it was brilliant. He sent an email to the entire company, branding it as our proprietary digital visionary and strictly forbidding anyone from questioning its output. I'm currently being praised as a master architect of machine learning, and my department budget was just increased by $75k to accommodate server maintenance for the new system. I plan to use that entire budget increase to install a commercial-grade espresso machine in the server room and hire a local contractor to soundproof the walls. Corporate executives don't actually want advanced technological solutions. They just want a shiny, glowing box that validates the meaningless business-slop they read on Twitter.

Corporate decided it was time to crack down on remote work efficiency by quietly rolling out an invasive keystroke and mouse-tracking software package across the entire company. The directive came from a newly hired "Director of Productivity" (lol) who sent out a passive-aggressive memo stating that data-driven metrics would finally expose the weakest links in our organizational chain. He made the fatal mistake of assuming the IT department would blindly deploy his spyware without thoroughly inspecting its root architecture first. Within 15 minutes of receiving the deployment package, I discovered the software relied on a lazy, unencrypted local daemon to transmit the activity logs. I wrote a lightweight Bash script that mimics a highly productive employee by generating exactly 45 randomized keystrokes and 3 complex mouse movements every 60 seconds. I deployed this script to my own workstation, completely insulating myself from the digital dragnet while I spent the entire morning researching the best ways to perfectly sear a wagyu steak. However, I decided that sheer self-preservation wasn't quite enough to send a proper message to the Director of Productivity about the dangers of challenging my autonomy. I covertly re-routed the monitoring software's target parameters on his personal laptop, linking his activity tracker directly to the central servers running the company's automated trash compaction schedule. By 1:00 PM, his dashboard showed that he'd personally typed 4,000,000 words and clicked his mouse 850,000 times in 1 single morning. The automated HR compliance system instantly flagged him for suspected robotic automation and locked him out of his account. He showed up at my desk at 2:30 PM, visibly panicked and begging me to restore his access. I stared at him for an uncomfortably long time, sighed heavily, and told him his new software had triggered a massive polymorphic logic bomb within our active directory. I explained that the sheer volume of invasive packet sniffing had destabilized the localized neural net, and I'd have to manually scrub his user profile from the mainframe to prevent a total company-wide data meltdown. He apologized for stepping on my toes and promising he'd never deploy unauthorized tracking tools again without my explicit written consent. I graciously accepted his apology, hit 1 button to unlock his account, and recommended he permanently delete the monitoring software for everyone's safety. The software was uninstalled company-wide by 4:00 PM, and I went back to browsing luxury leather recliners on company time. If you establish the narrative that you control the weather, nobody will ever dare to ask you why it keeps raining on their specific parade.

An external auditor from a massive, globally recognized accounting firm showed up entirely unannounced at 9:15 AM to review our corporate data retention policies. This is usually a complete nightmare scenario for any IT department, but I've spent the last 15 years meticulously preparing for exactly this kind of intrusion. The auditor smugly demanded instant, read-only access to our primary database clusters so he could verify our compliance with international privacy laws. I nodded, grabbed a totally useless, heavily tangled adapter cable from my bottom desk drawer, and silently led him down the long hallway to the main server room. Before allowing him to open the door, I made him put on a pair of static-free surgical booties and an uncomfortable grounding strap attached to his left wrist. I told him in a deadpan voice that our servers were currently undergoing severe Faraday cage degradation, and any unexpected static discharge could instantly wipe the company's entire 10 year financial history. Once we were inside the freezing room, I pointed to a massive rack of flashing servers and told him he needed to personally authenticate his identity through our "biometric firewall bypass protocol". I handed him an old fingerprint scanner from 2007 and told him to hold his right thumb on the glass for exactly 2 minutes without blinking or moving. While he stood there in the freezing cold server room holding his breath like an idiot, I discreetly flipped a physical hardware switch that isolated the guest Wi-Fi network from the internet. I then told him his designated audit portal was ready, but warned him that the local database was currently experiencing highly volatile sub-atomic packet fragmentation. He spent the next 45 minutes trying to load a single text query on his laptop while the fake fingerprint scanner periodically beeped at him for no reason. Eventually, he gave up, shivering uncontrollably and visibly frustrated, and asked if I could just email him a self-certified compliance report by end of week. I agreed to take on the heavy, unpaid burden of manual administrative certification, and he practically ran out of the building to thaw out in his leased sedan. I grabbed my iPad and settled in behind the humming backup generators for a well-deserved, uninterrupted morning nap. External auditors are exactly like senior executives. If you make the physical process uncomfortable enough and make your explanations confusing enough, they'll usually just agree with you and do whatever you say.

@it_unprofession you

The executive team decided we needed to prioritize endpoint security this quarter. They mandated a company-wide phishing simulation. I fully supported this initiative. I sent out an email offering a free $50 Starbucks gift card to anyone who clicked a highly suspicious link. Exactly 47 people clicked it within the first 10 minutes. I didn't report them to HR. I sent them a follow-up email informing them they'd failed a critical compliance audit. I told them their workstations were now classified as compromised tactical vulnerabilities. I explained that to mitigate the lateral movement of potential malware, they had to surrender their secondary monitors. I cited a non-existent federal guideline about visual data transmission. By 3 PM, I had a stack of 47 high-definition Dell monitors sitting in my office. I didn't return them to inventory. I transported 12 of them to the abandoned storage closet behind the breakroom. I spent the entire weekend building a 360-degree immersive flight simulator pod. I wired the monitors together using a proprietary daisy-chain method I learned from a Reddit thread in 2014. I bolted a high-end HOTAS joystick to a discarded ergonomic desk. Now I spend 4 hours a day flying a virtual Cessna across the digital Alps. Whenever someone asks where I am, my automated Slack integration says I'm conducting deep-level packet inspection. Technically, I'm inspecting packets of data that render the Swiss countryside.

We recently hired a brand new systems architect who showed up at 8 AM on his very first day with a color-coded notebook full of aggressive optimization strategies. He was 24 years old, desperately eager to prove his worth to upper management, and had clearly never learned the fundamental, unwritten laws of corporate survival. He cornered me near the breakroom coffee machine and pointed out that my automated ticket-routing scripts were inefficient and written in an obsolete, unsupported version of Bash. He offered to stay late and rewrite my entire 2008 architecture in Rust, claiming it'd save the company precious milliseconds of processing time every single day. I looked at him with a mixture of pity and absolute disgust, realizing I had to crush his spirit before he ruined my carefully balanced ecosystem of laziness. I pulled him aside and told him that my scripts were actually legacy load-bearing dependencies, and altering a single line of that sacred code would trigger an asynchronous loop cascade across the primary servers. He looked confused, adjusting his glasses while trying to explain that an "asynchronous loop cascade" wasn't a real computer science concept taught in any university. I immediately opened my administrative portal and reassigned him to manually audit the physical toner levels of all 147 network printers scattered across the tri-state area. I explained that this was a highly classified perimeter-hardening exercise mandated by the CEO, and he was the absolute only person with the technical pedigree to handle such a sensitive task. He spent the next 8 hours walking blindly from floor to floor with a clipboard while I spent those same 8 hours watching documentaries about Charles Manson. By 5:00 PM, he returned to my desk covered in black toner ink, visibly exhausted, and his bright spark of youthful innovation had been completely extinguished. He'll never again try to touch my sacred, automated Bash scripts, and I've successfully maintained the perfect, undisturbed equilibrium of my non-existent workload. If you want to survive for decades in this highly competitive industry, you've got to neutralize ambitious threats before they optimize you straight out of a comfortable job. I generously rewarded his hard work by granting him access to the secondary printer supply closet, cementing my status as a tough but fair mentor.

Annual budget reviews are the absolute easiest part of my job because financial executives are biologically programmed to fear technology they don't understand. The CFO scheduled a 60 minute meeting to scrutinize my department's expenditures for the upcoming fiscal year, hoping to trim the fat from my operational costs. He came into my office armed with spreadsheets, multiple highlighters, and a very clear intention to cut my software licensing budget by at least 20%. I let him speak for 5 minutes before I pulled up a terminal window and started running a completely meaningless traceroute command in bright green, matrix-style text. I stared at the scrolling text on my monitor, let out a slow, painful whistle, and asked him if he was entirely comfortable accepting the severe risk of a quantum latency cascading failure. He stopped talking immediately, his eyes darting to the terminal, and asked what that meant, which is the exact moment I knew I'd already won the negotiation. I explained that our legacy mainframes were highly susceptible to zero-day heuristic payloads, and cutting my budget would leave our global payment gateways completely naked to ransomware syndicates. I threw in the phrase "asynchronous degradation" just to overwhelm his remaining mental bandwidth and ensure he wouldn't attempt to fact-check my claims. I told him that without a 15% budget increase, I couldn't guarantee that the automated payroll system wouldn't spontaneously encrypt itself by next Friday. He closed his laptop, wiped a visible bead of sweat from his forehead, and approved my requested $50k discretionary fund without asking a single follow-up question. That specific discretionary fund is allocated to buying an ultra-quiet mechanical keyboard, a mini-fridge, and a massive 4K monitor that I'll strictly use for watching HD movies. I walked out of his office, sent an email to the board of directors about successfully hardening our fiscal perimeter, and headed straight to the cafeteria for a victory snack. The true art of corporate IT management is making sure the people who sign the checks are completely terrified of the invisible digital infrastructure they legally own. As long as I keep speaking in apocalyptic, incomprehensible riddles, they'll keep handing me blank checks to fund my incredibly comfortable early retirement plan.

People think "the cloud" is some magical, fluffy sanctuary in the sky where their precious photos and emails float in harmony. But I know the freezing truth here on the concrete floor of the Ashburn facility at 4:00 AM. The cloud is terrifying. It lives in a labyrinth of steel, with screaming cooling fans and dust filters that smell like ozone melting. If I don’t manually swap out the failing solid-state drives in Row 9, half of the east coast loses the ability to stream Love Island. Tonight, I accidentally dropped a lukewarm Red Bull directly into the mainframe hosting a major airline's booking system. Instead of crashing, the server immediately started speaking to me in tongues through my noise-canceling headphones. It told me the exact date of my own death and then ordered 10,000 units of industrial-grade bubble wrap to my apartment. Honestly, it’s the most meaningful conversation I’ve had with anyone this year.

HR tried to mandate a 4-hour cybersecurity awareness training for my department this morning, completely ignoring the fact that my entire department consists solely of me. This aggressive corporate overreach was a direct assault on my carefully curated schedule of doing absolutely nothing, and I refused to let it stand. The head HR representative emailed me a link to an unskippable video module that required periodic, timed mouse clicks to prove I was sitting at my desk paying attention. I immediately opened Notepad and wrote a 12-line Python script that automatically locates the screen coordinates of the "Next" button and clicks it precisely every 45 seconds. Then I set my company status to "System-Wide Compliance Audit", forwarded my phone to a disconnected extension in the basement, and went out to my car to take a 2 hour nap with the AC running. When I woke up and walked back to my desk, the mandatory training was finished, and I'd successfully printed a gold-star certificate of excellence in enterprise password management. I decided to take things a step further to ensure this never happened again, so I emailed the head of HR to say her outsourced training portal was leaking encrypted biometric data through a vulnerable cross-site scripting loop. I told her the vendor was using unpatched legacy protocols that severely compromised our entire Active Directory infrastructure and exposed our payroll data to the dark web. She called my desk phone within 10 seconds, her voice visibly trembling, asking exactly what we needed to do to avoid a massive regulatory fine and a public relations nightmare. I told her I'd have to manually sandbox the entire HR server architecture, which would unfortunately, but necessarily, delete all records of incomplete training for the rest of the calendar year. She begged me to do whatever it took to secure the network, completely unaware that I just wanted to save myself the immense hassle of ever receiving another automated reminder email about workplace ergonomics. I quickly wrote a server-side rule that silently deletes any incoming email containing the word "training" before it even has the chance to hit my inbox. Now the entire executive leadership team thinks I single-handedly thwarted a massive compliance breach, and HR considers me their personal digital guardian angel. I celebrated this victory by spending the rest of the afternoon watching in-depth YouTube tutorials on how to properly smoke a brisket. Corporate bureaucracy is just a game of chicken, and the person who uses the most terrifying acronyms always wins the right to dictate the rules. Tomorrow, I plan to submit an invoice for "emergency diagnostic consulting", which will perfectly cover the cost of the Traeger Woodridge Pellet Grill I just ordered online.

I've just expensed a $145 steak lunch under the project code for "strategic vendor alignment", which is an account I created exclusively to fund my midday culinary excursions. There wasn't a vendor at the restaurant, just me, a medium-rare ribeye, a side of truffle mac and cheese, and the latest episode of a serial killer documentary playing on my heavily encrypted phone. My calendar currently says I'm locked in a critical infrastructure war room, which means my company-wide Slack status is set to an intimidating, unblinking red circle. I configured a deeply nested cron job back in 2009 that automatically updates my status to say I'm actively mitigating a DDoS attack every Tuesday at exactly noon. This flawless automation gives me exactly 3 hours to enjoy my lavish meal, order a second espresso, and completely ignore the 14 frantic, increasingly desperate emails from the sales department. Apparently, our internal CRM database is experiencing extreme latency right now, which is entirely my fault because I secretly throttled its bandwidth to download a 40 gigabyte torrent of classic arcade games directly to the mainframe. When I finally strolled back into the lobby at 3:15 PM, holding a toothpick and smelling faintly of expensive garlic butter, the Director of Sales practically sprinted over to me in a total panic. He asked if we were under a targeted cyber assault from a hostile foreign state actor, because that's the exact rumor I casually planted in the breakroom last month just to keep everyone on edge. I put my hand on his shoulder, looked deeply and seriously into his eyes, and told him the CRM was suffering from polymorphic data displacement across the tertiary cloud nodes. I explained that I'd just spent the last 3 hours in a high-stakes, off-site negotiation with our firewall vendor to manually extract his team's leads from a heavily corrupted digital sector. He actually had tears in his eyes when he thanked me for my relentless dedication to the company's bottom line and my willingness to skip lunch for the sake of the team. I nodded solemnly, accepted his profound gratitude, walked straight to the secure server room, and unthrottled the bandwidth so I could start playing a newly downloaded copy of Pac-Man. The executive management team genuinely thinks I'm the only thing standing between them and total, apocalyptic corporate collapse. The reality is that my entire daily workload could be successfully completed by a smart toaster with a basic Wi-Fi connection, but as long as they keep paying me $200k, I'll keep saving them from my own imaginary digital disasters. This is the essence of high-level IT survival, creating an environment where your absence means chaos and your presence is viewed as an absolute miracle of engineering. I'm currently drafting an email to the CEO requesting a $10k budget increase for advanced perimeter defense software, which I fully intend to spend on a massage chair for the server room. The greatest trick I ever pulled was convincing an entire board of directors that turning things off and turning them back on again requires a master's degree in cybersecurity.

I’ve spent the last three hours "conducting an audit of our physical network security boundaries," which is corporate code for napping behind the backup generators. The server room is honestly the best place to nap in the building. It's dark, perfectly climate-controlled, and nobody dares to walk in without an escort. The CEO tried to page me earlier because the office Wi-Fi went down, threatening to disrupt a major investor pitch deck presentation. I walked into the boardroom 30 minutes later, wearing a safety vest and holding a completely disconnected fiber optic cable that I frayed at the ends for dramatic purposes. I looked him dead in the eye and told him a rogue firmware update had initiated an unmapped cascade failure across our local subnets. I explained that if I hadn't manually quarantined the data packets, the entire corporate bank account would've leaked into the public domain. He didn't just buy it; he looked visibly shaken and asked if he should authorize an emergency budget increase for my department. I told him I’d handle it silently behind the scenes, walked back to my server-room sanctuary, and turned the Wi-Fi router back on with my foot.

I’m currently sitting in my ergonomic leather chair, making $200k a year to stare at a network topology map that hasn’t changed since Obama’s first term. The VP of Marketing just stormed into my office because the main corporate dashboard has been down for three hours. She’s sweating, talking about lost revenue, and demanding to know when the engineering team's going to deploy a fix. I didn’t even look up from my iPad. I just sighed and told her we’re experiencing severe, multi-layered packet fragmentation across the regional DNS propagation layer. I threw in a casual mention of "sub-atomic data bleeding" just to make sure she wouldn’t give me any pushback. She has no clue what that means because it's not a real thing. She apologized for interrupting my workflow, thanked me for my visionary leadership, and left the room. The truth is, I unplugged the main router this morning because the fan noise was interfering with the true-crime documentary I’m trying to finish (I highly recommend watching Worst Neighbor Ever). I’ll plug it back in around 4:00 PM, claim I performed a miraculous hot-swap of the fiber matrix, and log it as a strategic win for the quarter.

I haven't written a single line of functional code since 2011, and yet I’m currently the highest-rated IT manager on our company’s internal feedback portal. The entire trick to high-level IT leadership is establishing a baseline of absolute, unyielding mystery around what you actually do. I automated my entire daily workload over a decade ago using a series of nested Bash scripts I copied off an old Stack Overflow thread (RIP). The scripts automatically approve basic tickets, generate fake network health reports, and send Slack messages to the CISO saying "perimeter secured" every six hours. This leaves my calendar completely wide open to focus on what truly matters: finding the absolute quietest corner of the facility to take a two-hour nap. Today, a bright-eyed junior engineer tried to tell me our entire database structure is wildly inefficient and needs a modern cloud overhaul. I stared at him until he got uncomfortable, told him his proposed architecture lacked "holistic synergy," and reassigned him to printer maintenance. The best IT infrastructure is one that is never touched, never updated, and never looked at directly by anyone who cares about their career.

@it_unprofession we wear the same uniform to work

Our CEO sent out a company-wide mandate requiring a 3-day RTO schedule. He said we need to maximize the utility of our commercial real estate footprint. I completely agree. Which is why I spent my entire weekend migrating 14 custom-built Ethereum mining rigs into the drop ceiling above my office. My residential electricity bill was getting completely out of hand. It was severely cutting into my margins. Now the company is subsidizing my crypto portfolio. By Tuesday afternoon, the ambient temperature in my section of the floor had reached 85 degrees. The VP of Operations walked by and asked why my office sounded like a jet engine. I told him I was stress-testing our localized hardware latency. I explained that to truly prepare for a catastrophic system failure, we need to simulate the thermal dynamics of a data center collapse. He nodded and commended my proactive approach to risk management. He's a very gullible man. I have 4 industrial fans blowing across open GPU chassis right above my desk. I wear shorts and a tank top under my quarter-zip fleece to cope with the climate I've created. Facilities tried to submit a work order to inspect the HVAC zoning. I intercepted the ticket and closed it with a note saying it was a resolved DNS propagation issue. They'll never question a closed ticket that mentions DNS. I'm mining $400 a day in unregulated digital currency on the company dime.