I
had an idea to write a short story, originally a tongue-in-cheek attempt at
trying to tell the Gospel through the best practices that I’ve learned since
starting in the managed services industry. Below is my attempt. Over the past
few weeks, I’ve chipped away at it wanting to do something more comprehensive,
actually trying to turn it into a “short-medium” short story. Clocking in at
2200+ words this is a reasonable size, what I would typically expect for a
short story with a well-established world and narrative progression. Also, something
to note, the story may be interpreted critically, either for better or worse,
how the Gospel’s narrative has shaped our understanding of literature and the
arts. (Structurally, the Gospel is a “comedy” in the classical sense,
ultimately concluding with a wedding (as seen in the Revelation of Saint John) like
most of the Shakespeare comedies.) I will leave you to be the judge of that, however. Anyways, enjoy!
In
the beginning there was the Operating System, and the Operating System was with
the Engineer, and the Operating System was the Engineer. From crowded rack
space and winding spools of cabling effervescent, the Environment was unmade,
without purpose or clarity. The Engineer, on the first billable hour, made the
host, and it was provisioned. The Engineer, on the second billable hour,
allocated the datastores with virtual machines of all variety and utility: A
domain controller to elect, a file server to preserve, an intrusion prevention
system to protect, an exchange server to commune. And it was provisioned. On
the third billable hour, the Engineer PXE booted His VMs, the Operating System
giving shape and form to them, filling their disks with files to give glory to
the Administrator, who sent the Engineer onsite to be with the end user, but
not of the end user, as a staff augmentation. On the fourth billable hour, the
Engineer deployed group policy, making the end users in His image. And the
Engineer looked down on all he had made and said, "it is
provisioned."
And
then the Engineer rested on His lunch hour, telling the end user before
leaving, saying, "All that I have made is yours—that I have created—for
your productivity and purpose. You may access the network shares. You may
leverage email. You may create files as I created them. But you must not have administrative access, for if you do, you will surely compromise the integrity
of the Environment."
While
the Engineer was away, Amy and Steven in accounting were running end of month
billing. And they enjoyed the responsiveness of the workstations and the
synergy felt by one another working together as one, without network latency or
corrupted installations. But the Sales Manager was also in the Environment, and
approached Amy as she made copies in the break room.
"Why
have you not installed BitTorrent to your local workstation? Greg in HR has,
like, three seasons of Game of Thrones already..."
Amy
replied that she did not have administrative access, and that the Engineer said
explicitly that they should not have those permissions.
"But
if you are an Administrator, you will be like an Administrator. And you will
know the difference between being able to install programs and uninstall
programs," replied the Sales Manager.
So
Amy allowed the Sales Manager to make her a local admin, and then a domain
admin, all the while installing iTunes and internet games and opening emails
with strange documents. When Steven saw Amy playing Candy Crush on her laptop
in-between calls, he asked Amy to make him a local admin (as the Sales Manager
had shown her) also. Amy then gave him administrative access so that he too
could play games and view private folders with her.
But
once they had downloaded the programs, each of them looked at one another
realizing that their machines were burdened, slow, and filled with adware. And
so they began to complain.
But
when the Engineer returned early from his lunch he called out to Amy and asked
her, "Where are you?"
"We
saw that you had come back from your break and needed to close out of our
programs. But they were too slow," Amy replied. "Slow your roll,
man."
"What
made you think that they were slow? Did you install non-work related programs
onto your machines when I forbade you to?" said the Administrator, coming
out of His office.
But
Amy and Steven reproached the Administrator, first complaining that they needed
to run updates to Quickbooks and then that they had needed to give each other
access in order to do so. This made the Engineer frustrated, as well as the
Administrator.
"It
was Amy that gave me the access," said Steven defensively.
"It
was the Sales Manager that told me I ought to have access," said Amy.
"I need music and games, so that I don't get stressed out while I
work!"
So
the Administrator stripped them of their access, not before mentioning that
their workstations would be slow and toilsome for the rest of the quarter.
"Behold, I will send my Engineer to terminate the Sales Manager's
employment for violating the Acceptable Use Policy, though not before the Sales
Manager will, in anger, delete the company share on the file server, causing
the Engineer to spend many project hours to recover the files from the Nimble
storage backups."
So
what seemed like centuries passed, as, every day, the machines loaded
non-essential startup programs, demonstrated visual artifacts, and loaded
applications inefficiently.
Until,
one day there came a crying from the branch office, from John the Office
Manager, saying that the Engineer would be onsite again, as was promised by the
Administrator long ago. For John had been in a Highfive conference with the
Administrator, who had approved of the Engineer's restoration of the company
shares saying, "Joshua did a bang up job with that DR restore. I'm going
to send him to corporate to finally fix the other issues we've been
scoping." Therefore, in an abuse of "hey, everybody," John
prepared them by sending a staff email.
When
the Engineer arrived, the Sales Manager was sitting outside headquarters,
covered in rags and living homeless behind the row of juniper trees planted
along the perimeter of the building. The Sales Manager recognized the Engineer
and approached Him as he ascended the steps, skirting past a dried fountain and
looking out for the bulbous security guard patrolling in his golf cart.
"No
hard feelings, Josh."
Josh
turned to the Sales Manager and stopped, curious and bemused.
"You
know how many people are hiring for an on-premise IT guy?" the Sales
Manager said lethargically, drinking from a brown paper bag. "You could
get work for any of those guys and make waaay more money, kid."
"The
Administrator once told me, job success and happiness is better than a pay
increase. I'll stick with that, thanks."
The
Engineer began to walk again, but the Sales Manager grabbed Him again and
pressured, "You have no idea, do you? Those suits up there, they'll eat
you alive. You need to have the Administrator come out. Only he can fix
this."
The
Engineer rolled his eyes, removing the grasping fingers from around his arm.
"He sent me to handle this. I'm not going to bother him about it."
"Oh
yeah?" complained the Sales Manager. He shouted loudly across the
pavilion. "Come work for me then! I'm starting my own company, and it's
going to blow! This! Shit! Up! Home loans and short term lending. I'm telling
you, this is going to be the next big thing."
Josh
blinked, incredulous.
By
now, Hank was waddling up to them pumping his fat arms against the sides of his
tremulous belly. "Hey! What did I tell ya'? Get ova' 'ere!"
The
Sales Manager was startled, jumping up into the air and shuffled off like an
ape. The Engineer watched, amused, and shrugged. He was ready to get back to
work.
When
the Engineer, sent by the Administrator, entered the bullpen, and returned to
see many of his co-workers, bent and low, cursing their duties, he wept.
Going
around the office the Engineer went to each machine, performing maintenance on
them, miraculously restoring print spooler services and casting out malware,
with the power of the Operating System's native antivirus software. But
Management watched him all the while, cursing his name for all the overtime he
was logging, saying to themselves, "He's not certified," and "He
never got our approval for all this OT!"
Though
some disagreed, saying to themselves, "Didn't an email already go out
about this?" and "Who cares? Look at all the good work he's
doing."
But
Josh heard them grumbling, saying these things to themselves and replied,
"Something is coming down the pipe that will change the way we do billing.
Don't worry about it, it'll be fine."
At
the end of the week, while working in the later hours of the afternoon, Josh
was approached by a woman with malware on her personal workstation. She had
heard of all His hard work and tugged on the hem of His faded UC Santa Cruz
sweater. Feeling the weight of her need, Josh turned around and asked,
"Who was that?" and looked down to see the woman, for she was kind of
short.
"My
machine is slow. I know that my computer isn't work related, but could you just
look at it really fast?"
Josh
nodded in agreement. "Well, I'm here to fix the broken machines, not the
workings ones."
Powering
on the machine, looking at the startup programs, scanning for adware and
potentially unwanted programs, the Engineer extracted all the bloatware and
installed antivirus that was continually scanning. "This should keep
scanning automatically. It'll help keep your machine running well even if there
are issues going forward." Josh paused to pull out His phone and sent an
email to the woman. "I just sent you the acceptable use policy. Please
read it and remember what I have told you, so that this doesn't happen again.
But I'm always a call away if you need anything."
As
the woman thanked the Engineer, the management watched. And they said to
themselves, "He's doing things out of agreement now. We have to put a stop
to this!"
That
afternoon, they brought Him into the large conference room at the north end of
the building.
"You've
been here for a full day, helping everyone, even working on assets that we
don't want you supporting. Do you expect us to pay for all these billable
hours?"
"It'll
be fine," Josh assured them. "You'll see. The Administrator has some
big plans about how we'll be doing IT infrastructure management from now on.
All the work I just did was covered under the 'New Agreement.'"
The
management team were confused and angry. "You were not mentioned by our
account manager. And all of this work you did is going to cost us a fortune.
The Administrator made this very clear to us in the beginning."
Josh
shrugged. "I don't know what to say. I mean, you're just going to have to
trust me. There is a New Agreement coming. It will be cost effective and allow
us to do more work for you. It will be mutually beneficial and built and sealed
with trust. The way things are working right now were good before, but we've
all been working up to this New Agreement. The Administrator trusts me to offer
this New Agreement and has put me in charge of negotiating it."
The
management team became angry when they heard this, getting up from their chairs
and kindly asking the Engineer to leave, saying, "I think we would like to
seek other solutions for our internal IT. We would like you to leave."
"You're
firing me?" Josh asked.
"Yes.
And we are also going to file a formal complaint with the Administrator if you
have any intention of making us pay for the work you did while you were onsite
today."
Josh
called the Administrator.
"Yeah,
you've reached Yale's cell, owner of Moody IT. I'm not here right now, but
leave me your name and number—and the time you called—and I'll give you a call
back."
As
Josh left the building, looking at his phone, the Administrator never called
back.
And
Josh stepped out into the rain, shoving his phone into his pocket. "Man?
What the hell..."
On
the following Sunday morning at the Chamber of Commerce Sausage and Egg
Breakfast, some of the members were gossiping, saying to themselves, "Did you hear about what happened to Josh? Tough break. It sounded like
all he was doing was trying to help those guys at Wright, Cody, and
Stubb."
Another
member, one that they did not immediately recognize approached and said,
"Who's Josh?"
Hal
Bailey, the owner of the local co-op, answered, saying, "He was the
on-prem engineer for Moody IT. Super cool guy. Shame what happened to
him."
"He
must have been fired," the other member replied, drinking a mimosa.
Hal
laughed, shaking his head. "Guy was fucking crucified. For
doing his job no less." The others agreed with Hal, nodding silently under
the glare of florescent lights, highlighting
the polyurethane gloss of hardwood furniture and the scuffed chrome
of industrial toasters.
Josh
revealed Himself to them, laughing at their surprise.
"Woah!
Hey man! Didn't recognize you in those big dumb sunglasses. Since when do you
wear those?" Hal said.
Josh
folded them up and put them into his pocket. "I ran out of
contacts. This was all I had lying around from when I last saw the
optometrist."
"So,
what's going on?" Hal asked, waving what may had been his third mimosa
that morning in a wide, hyperbolic gesture. "I heard you were
fired?"
"Sort
of," Josh said looking at his feet. "Yale is still trying to talk
them down from the ledge right now. In the meantime we are pushing out our new
strategy to new clients. It's all based off of remote management, with a call
center, where I'll always be available to talk, and unlimited support for a
fixed rate. We're in the process of re-branding right now."
"Congratulations,"
said Hal, raising his glass. "You have any new hires yet?"
"A
few, but I've got a good feeling that we'll be blowing up pretty soon...."