[joe rogan] so you're saying you've never been fed?
[domestic cat that was fed thirty minutes ago] that's right joe. i've never been fed in my entire whole life
[joe rogan] wow
I just want you to remember. That we live in a world where octopuses dream, otters have a favorite shell that they carry with them all their lives, cows have best friends, and bees have different "dialects" of dance depending on the region. Cats purr at a frequency that accelerates bone healing, the forest grows flowers first after a fire, and dolphins give each other names and respond to them. Penguins make proposals by giving each other the most beautiful pebble
I have a strict personal rule that I never work on Fridays during the summer.
Unfortunately, our CEO scheduled a mandatory, all-hands strategy meeting for 2 PM on a Friday.
I knew the only way to cancel the meeting was to manufacture a catastrophic infrastructure emergency.
At exactly 1:45 PM, I logged into the primary firewall and blacklisted our own internal IP subnet.
The entire corporate network instantly went dark.
Slack went down, the VPN collapsed, and nobody could access the cloud servers.
The panic on the executive floor was immediate and incredibly satisfying to watch.
The CEO ran into the server room and asked if we were under a coordinated cyber attack from a foreign state actor.
I aggressively typed on my mechanical keyboard while staring at a completely meaningless command prompt window.
I told him we were experiencing a synchronized DNS avalanche targeting our core routing tables.
I used the phrase "malicious payload saturation."
I said I needed to manually sever the external fiber lines to prevent the ransomware from encrypting our financial records.
He told me to do whatever it takes to save the company and immediately sent out an email blast canceling the all-hands meeting.
I told everyone to go home because their physical presence was interfering with the wireless spectrum of my counter-offensive.
The building was completely empty by 2:15 PM.
I waited exactly 45 minutes to let the tension build while I ate a sandwich in the server room and watched an episode of Planet Earth.
Then I deleted the single line of code I had written and the network instantly came back online.
I walked out of the server room covered in a light layer of tactical sweat.
I called the CEO and told him I had successfully isolated the breach and deployed a proprietary counter-measure to shield the perimeter.
I explained that the battle was brutal, but our customer data was secured.
He was so relieved he gave me a $5K spot bonus and told me to take the next week off to recover from the digital trauma.
I spent the week at a luxury spa.
Being an IT hero is incredibly easy when you're also the architect of the disaster.