A VP submitted an urgent ticket saying his wireless mouse was dead.
He demanded I bring a replacement to his corner office immediately.
The IT supply closet is three floors down and I had just found a really good stopping point in my audiobook.
I remoted into his machine and opened his webcam.
I called his extension and told him to hold the dead mouse up to the camera so I could scan its serial number.
When he did, I gasped and asked if he was wearing a lead apron.
He looked horrified and said no.
I explained that the mouse's internal lithium matrix had breached and was emitting a localized cloud of beta radiation.
I told him that touching it for more than five minutes causes permanent bone marrow crystallization.
I ordered him to wrap the mouse in tinfoil, place it in a Tupperware container, and bury it in his backyard.
He asked how he was supposed to work for the rest of the day.
I told him using the trackpad builds character and hung up.
I went back to my audiobook.
Our CTO asked for a “single pane of glass dashboard” that shows literally everything happening in IT.
I told him that’s impossible without significant architecture changes and at least 2 new platforms.
That’s a lie.
I already have a single pane of glass: it’s a browser tab with our monitoring tool and 10 custom filters.
If he got access, he’d start asking questions like “why is CPU at 92% here” and “what’s this alert.”
Then I’d have to explain, and explaining is unpaid emotional labor.
So I built him a fake dashboard in PowerPoint.
The graphs are just animated GIFs looping the same fake data forever.
He stares at it in meetings and says things like “I can see our resilience story improving in real time.”
Everyone is dumb except me.
I should get a raise.