Petty IT Guy

IT admin. I have been here 14 years and I am the only one who knows the WIFI password. I am so tired.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

I saved the company $280,000 this quarter.

I also accidentally destroyed one department.

We were renewing a project-management platform that had 1,400 paid seats.

I checked the usage logs.

Almost 600 people had not logged in for more than 90 days.

So I disabled their licenses.

Within six minutes, Marketing declared a Sev-1 incident.

Apparently their entire strategic planning process depended on 47 people having access to boards they had not opened since February.

The VP demanded that I restore everyone immediately.

I asked which employees actually needed access.

She said all of them.

I asked her to name five.

She said that wasn't the point.

So I created a simple rule.

Anyone who needed their license back had to submit a ticket describing what they used the software for.

By the end of the week, 83 people had requested access.

The other 517 never noticed.

Finance was ecstatic.

The CFO asked how we had identified so much waste.

I told him we implemented a usage-based software governance framework.

He asked if we could apply the same methodology to every subscription SaaS product in the company.

Marketing has stopped inviting me to meetings.

Finance now invites me to all of them.

This feels like a lateral move.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

I've had a private conference room reserved every afternoon from 2:00 to 5:00 for the last 4 months.

I don't hold meetings in it.

I take naps.

The room is technically called “Executive Conference Room B,” but it has a locking door, no exterior windows, and a couch that was apparently selected by someone who hates lumbar support.

The problem was getting it off everyone else’s calendar.

So I created a recurring reservation called:

“Network Security Incident Response Hold.”

Nobody books over that.

At first, Facilities asked why IT needed the same room every day.

I told them we needed a secure physical location for sensitive incident coordination because open-office environments could expose privileged information.

They agreed.

Then Legal heard about it.

They asked whether they should have access to the room during active incidents.

I said yes, but only if specifically requested by security.

They seemed relieved not to be invited.

Last month, the CIO walked by while I was asleep.

I woke up and told him I was testing fatigue-management procedures for extended outage response.

He stared at me for a few seconds.

Then he said we should probably document that.

Now there is an official IT policy requiring “rest rotation during prolonged critical incidents.”

I wrote it from the couch.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

HR asked me to install employee monitoring software across every company laptop last month.

They wanted screenshots every five minutes, browser history, application usage, idle time, and an automated “productivity score” for every employee.

I told them this seemed invasive.

They told me the executive team had already approved it.

So I installed exactly what they requested.

Three weeks later, the VP of HR asked me to prepare a report showing the 20 least productive employees in the company.

I exported the data.

Seven of the bottom ten worked in HR.

One HR business partner had spent 19 hours on Zillow during business hours.

Another averaged 46 minutes of keyboard activity per day.

Someone had watched four complete seasons of Love Is Blind.

The VP asked whether I could exclude HR because their work was “less quantifiable.”

I said the software didn't have a setting for that.

She asked if I could manually adjust the scores.

I reminded her that manipulating employee surveillance data might create a compliance issue.

She went very quiet.

At 3:17 PM, HR announced that after “careful consideration,” the monitoring software did not align with our culture of trust.

They asked me to uninstall it immediately.

I completed the removal ticket in 11 minutes.

My productivity score for the day was 14%.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

Our CFO refused to use multifactor authentication for 3 years.

He said taking his phone out every time he logged in was “bad for productivity.”

Security sent him reminders.

He ignored them.

I escalated it.

He ignored me too.

So I stopped trying to convince him.

Instead, I updated our password policy.

Accounts without MFA now require a 32-character password containing uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, symbols, and no dictionary words.

Passwords expire every 14 days.

Password reuse is prohibited for the previous 48 passwords.

The CFO called me within 20 minutes.

He asked why his password suddenly needed to look like a nuclear launch code.

I explained that MFA allowed us to safely reduce password complexity.

He asked what people with MFA had to use.

I said 12 characters.

There was a long silence.

He enrolled in MFA.

The next morning he asked why everyone couldn't just use it.

I told him adoption among senior leadership had historically been difficult.

By lunchtime he'd emailed the executive team announcing that MFA would become mandatory company-wide.

He described it as an important cybersecurity initiative he had personally championed.

I replied-all thanking him for his leadership.

Sometimes the easiest way to implement security policy is to make the alternative slightly more annoying.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

Our CEO told me the Wi-Fi in his office was “basically unusable.”

He said this in front of the entire executive team.

So naturally it became the highest-priority infrastructure incident in the company.

I tested his connection.

940 Mbps down.

Perfect signal strength.

Zero packet loss.

I asked what specifically wasn't working.

He said YouTube kept buffering during lunch.

I opened his laptop.

He had 71 Chrome tabs open.

Three abandoned Zoom meetings were still running in the background.

Dropbox was syncing 84 gigabytes.

Google Drive was uploading a 4K video.

He had not restarted the machine in 47 days.

I could have explained this.

Instead I told him our executive wireless architecture had reached end-of-life.

He asked what it would cost to fix.

I said I would need to scope it.

He told me not to waste time and approved an $84,000 wireless modernization project before I finished the sentence.

We replaced 38 access points.

Installed a new wireless controller.

Rewired two conference rooms.

Brought in a consultant.

His YouTube still buffered.

I walked into his office, closed 68 Chrome tabs, killed the abandoned Zoom processes, and restarted the laptop.

YouTube loaded instantly.

He smiled.

“Now that's more like it.”

20 minutes later he emailed my boss praising me for successfully completing the company's wireless transformation ahead of schedule.

I received a spot bonus.

Sometimes infrastructure modernization is just restarting a MacBook for an inept executive.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

A VP of Sales asked me to reset his email password on a Tuesday morning.

That's a 4-second task, but doing it sets a dangerous precedent of accountability.

I immediately locked his entire department out of the domain and initiated a Level 4 protocol.

I told him his password request triggered a heuristic anomaly in the biometric firewall.

I explained that his account was likely compromised by a state-sponsored phishing syndicate.

He looked terrified and asked how we fix it.

I told him the only solution was a 14-day digital quarantine to let the corrupted packets decay naturally.

I confiscated his laptop, put it in a Faraday bag, and threw it in my trunk.

He had to conduct all his forecasting on a legal pad with a ballpoint pen.

I spent the next 2 weeks playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on my office projector.

I occasionally sent him cryptic text messages asking if he had clicked any suspicious links in the last 5 years.

On day 15, I gave him his laptop back and told him we successfully purged the malicious nodes.

He hugged me and bought me a $200 bottle of Scotch.

He now tells every new hire that I'm the only thing standing between us and total cyber warfare.

Never solve a problem when you can monetize a crisis.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

I've got 40 wheels of imported Parmigiano-Reggiano aging in the sub-floor of our main data center.

The climate control system for the mainframe keeps the room at a constant 55 degrees with 85% humidity.

It's the exact atmospheric profile of a 16th-century Italian cave.

I had to reroute the exhaust vents from 3 different server racks just to create the perfect draft for the rind development.

The facilities manager noticed the massive dairy shipment arriving at the loading dock.

I told him it was a highly specialized acoustic dampening matrix.

I explained that the density of the cheese absorbs high-frequency vibrations from the hard drives.

I warned him that without the cheese, our read-write speeds would suffer a catastrophic degradation.

He looked confused but helped me roll 3,000 pounds of dairy into the server room anyway.

Last week, the CEO said the office smelled like feet and aged milk.

I told him we were experiencing a localized microbial bloom in the biometric authentication manifold.

I explained that human skin cells were overwhelming our filtration system because the sales team sweats too much.

He authorized an $8K upgrade to our HVAC system without asking a single follow-up question.

My 1st batch of cheese finishes aging next month.

I'm going to sell it to high-end restaurants in the FiDi for $40 a pound.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

The board of directors called an emergency meeting last month to discuss our AI strategy.

They read an article in Forbes and suddenly panicked that we were falling behind the curve.

The CEO asked me how quickly we could integrate generative neural networks into our legacy infrastructure.

I told him our current server architecture would literally melt under the computational weight of an advanced language model.

I explained that we needed an isolated, off-site facility to house a dedicated GPU rendering cluster.

I threw around phrases like deep learning latency and algorithmic heat dissipation.

They immediately authorized a $1.5M capital expenditure to build the data center.

I didn't build a corporate AI data center.

I rented an industrial warehouse 45 minutes outside the city and bought 300 top-of-the-line RTX graphics cards.

I wired the entire facility to run a crypto mining farm.

I also lease out the remaining computing power to independent animation studios in Europe to render 3D movies.

It's the most profitable digital slumlord operation in the tri-state area.

Last week, a VP of Sales drove out to the facility because he wanted to "see the AI in person".

I couldn't let him inside because the warehouse is filled with glowing rigs and industrial box fans.

I met him in the parking lot and handed him a pair of lead-lined safety goggles.

I told him the localized electromagnetic radiation was currently too high for human exposure.

I explained that the neural net was processing 6 billion localized parameters and generating a microscopic microwave field.

He took one step backward and thanked me for prioritizing his health.

I pulled up a basic ChatGPT wrapper on my iPad that I built in 20 minutes.

I told him this was the secure terminal connecting directly to the mainframe.

He typed in a prompt asking the AI to write a motivational speech for the next town hall.

It spit out 4 paragraphs of generic corporate slop.

He printed it out and told me it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever read.

My mining rigs are currently generating $8K a week in obscure alt-coins.

I expense the massive electricity bill to the company under a line item called Cloud Compute Synaptic Overhead.

The board thinks I'm a visionary architect building the future of commerce.

I'm just hoarding graphics cards and waiting for the next Bitcoin halving.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

I wanted to spend 3 weeks in Tuscany but I refuse to use my accrued PTO.

PTO is a legacy concept designed to make humans feel grateful for temporary freedom.

I needed the company to mandate my absence.

On a Tuesday morning, I initiated a controlled, cascading failure of our secondary intranet portal.

It was a completely useless server that only hosted the cafeteria menu and the HR birthday calendar.

I called an emergency leadership meeting and projected a dashboard filled with flashing red graphs.

I told the executive team we were actively fighting a multi-vector polymorphic ransomware injection.

I paced around the boardroom and used phrases like localized packet hemorrhage and asymmetrical firewall breach.

The HR director panicked and asked if the employee social security numbers were compromised.

I told her the data was safe for now, but the virus was evolving.

I explained that the malware was utilizing advanced machine learning to track my specific biometric patterns through my keyboard latency.

I told them the virus was studying my behavioral firewall responses to anticipate my countermeasures.

I looked the CEO dead in the eye and said the only way to break the learning algorithm was to completely remove myself from the grid.

I told him I needed to undergo a 21-day digital cleanse to reset my circadian telemetry and confuse the ransomware.

The CEO was deeply moved by my willingness to sacrifice my routine for the safety of the mainframe.

He immediately approved 3 weeks of fully paid administrative leave.

He also handed me a corporate credit card for emergency off-grid survival expenses.

I used the card to book a first-class flight to Italy and rent a villa overlooking a vineyard.

I spent the entire month drinking expensive wine and eating cured meats.

To maintain the illusion of a grueling cyber war, I'd occasionally send the CEO a cryptic text message at 4 AM.

I'd just text him the word "Quarantined" or "Fragmentation Contained" and then turn my phone off for 48 hours.

When I finally returned to the office, the entire executive team gave me a standing ovation.

They think I spent 3 weeks in a dark room battling an international hacker syndicate.

I actually just gained 8 pounds eating Cacio e Pepe.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

My landlord tried to raise the rent on my downtown apartment to $4K a month.

I told him real estate is a depreciating physical asset and broke my lease.

I currently live in the primary corporate data center on the 5th floor of our office building.

Nobody comes into the data center because the ambient temperature is exactly 62 degrees and it sounds like a jet engine.

I used a row of obsolete IBM mainframes from 2012 to wall off a 300-square-foot section in the back corner.

I brought in a memory foam mattress, a 65-inch television, and a high-end espresso machine.

I sleep incredibly well surrounded by the white noise of enterprise routing switches.

The problem was figuring out how to shower without raising suspicion.

I tapped into the emergency fire suppression waterline and built a custom shower basin in the IT utility closet.

The building facilities manager noticed a massive spike in municipal water usage.

He came up to the 5th floor demanding to know if we had a leak.

I told him we'd just installed a hydrodynamic thermal siphon to cool our new quantum processors.

I explained that if the continuous water flow was interrupted, the servers would initiate a catastrophic localized meltdown.

He visibly paled and asked if the building's structural integrity was at risk.

I told him as long as nobody touched the utility closet, we'd avoid a thermal event.

He immediately ordered the custodial staff to avoid the IT wing.

I'm now the sole occupant of a highly secure, temperature-controlled luxury loft in a prime commercial district.

I cook my meals by placing foil-wrapped burritos on top of the primary firewall chassis.

The chassis runs at a constant 145 degrees because I intentionally loop a broken script to keep it warm.

The CEO recently praised me for my incredible dedication because my keycard logs show I'm in the office 24 hours a day.

He gave me a 20% performance bonus for transitioning to a continuous on-premise operational model.

He thinks I'm monitoring the perimeter for Russian cyber threats.

I'm actually just watching 14 hours of reality television while eating perfectly heated burritos.

Corporate real estate is free if you have root access to the security cameras.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

In 2017, I realized my entire job consisted of clicking approve on basic Azure deployment requests.

It was tedious manual labor masquerading as technical leadership.

I went on an offshore freelance board and hired a guy named Steve who lives in the Philippines.

I pay Steve $14 an hour out of my own pocket to mirror my desktop and do my job for me.

Steve is an absolute machine.

He works 12 hours a day and has memorized our entire network topology.

My annual salary is $230K, and Steve costs me roughly $28K a year.

It's the single greatest arbitrage opportunity in modern corporate capitalism.

The problem is that Steve is significantly better at my job than I ever was.

Our network efficiency skyrocketed by 40% and our server downtime dropped to absolute zero.

The board of directors noticed the metrics and wanted me to present my new operational framework at the quarterly meeting.

I panicked because I have no idea how our infrastructure actually works anymore.

Steve rebuilt the entire backend using modern architecture that I don't understand.

I couldn't just tell the board I outsourced my six-figure job to a guy in Manila.

So I told them I'd developed a proprietary AI avatar designed to autonomously manage our low-level packet routing.

During the Zoom presentation, I had Steve turn on his webcam.

I ran his video feed through a localized deep-fake filter that made him look like a glowing blue geometric wireframe.

I told the board they were looking at the Quantum Heuristic Interface.

Steve started flawlessly answering their complex engineering questions in real-time.

He explained our new load-balancing protocol with such terrifying precision that the CFO started taking frantic notes.

The board was mesmerized by the AI I'd birthed.

They immediately authorized a $50K research budget to upgrade the avatar's neural processing unit.

I just wired the entire $50K directly to Steve.

Steve used the money to buy a huge house and a new car for his family.

We're both living the absolute pinnacle of the American dream.

The executives think they own the most advanced infrastructure AI on the planet.

They actually just employ Steve, who is currently carrying my entire career on his back.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

The board of directors went to a retreat in Cabo last weekend.

They left the corporate headquarters completely empty.

I immediately booked the main executive boardroom for 72 consecutive hours.

I entered it into the shared calendar as a "Mandatory Dark Web Threat Simulation."

I used the corporate emergency fund to requisition 10 high-end Alienware gaming rigs.

I told finance they were cryptographic brute-force nodes required for penetration testing.

They cost $4K each.

Once they arrived, I invited 9 of my friends over.

We locked the boardroom doors and played CS:GO for 3 days straight.

I expensed $800 worth of pizza and energy drinks as "emergency responder rations."

On day 2, the HR director unexpectedly came into the office to grab a file.

She heard us screaming at each other through the frosted glass doors.

She swiped her badge and walked into absolute chaos.

There were empty Mountain Dew cans everywhere and 10 grown men wearing tactical headsets.

She looked horrified and asked what exactly was happening.

I didn't break eye contact with my monitor.

I told her we were in the middle of a live, high-velocity DDoS counter-offensive.

I explained that we were actively negotiating with Russian ransomware syndicates in real-time.

I pointed to my friend Dave and said he was our lead kinetic firewall specialist.

Dave works at a hardware store.

I told her the yelling was a necessary psychological tactic to maintain neural dominance over the hackers.

I used the phrase "asynchronous audio warfare."

She immediately backed out of the room and told us to keep up the good work.

We won the tournament and split a $5K prize pool.

On Monday, the CEO sent out a company-wide email praising my dedication to enterprise security.

He gave me an extra 5 days of paid time off to recover from the stress of the simulation.

I'm going to use those days to level up my World of Warcraft character.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

We have a $400K automated tape library that was supposed to handle cold storage backups.

It features a highly precise robotic arm designed to hot-swap magnetic cartridges in milliseconds.

Last month, I reprogrammed the arm's x-axis coordinates and replaced the tapes with premium liquor bottles.

It is now the most expensive robotic bartender on the eastern seaboard.

I can Slack a specific hex code to the mainframe, and it will perfectly mix a dry martini.

The CFO asked why our nightly backup protocol takes 4 hours and requires weekly shipments of vermouth.

I told her we were implementing a fluid-dynamic data retention matrix.

I explained that legacy code requires organic solvents to prevent bit rot in the magnetic arrays.

She thanked me for being proactive about our archival integrity.

I've been selling $20 cocktails to the marketing department on the down low for the last 3 weeks.

They drink A LOT.

At all hours of the day.

Good for them.

Even better for me.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

I have the absolute fastest internet connection in my entire zip code.

My house is wired with a dedicated commercial fiber optic line that costs $2,800 a month.

I don't pay for a single cent of it.

The company pays for it out of the general telecommunications budget.

Last year, I told the executive board that our corporate headquarters was a catastrophic single point of failure.

I said if the power went out downtown, our entire global supply chain would immediately collapse into gridlock.

I proposed establishing an off-site, mission-critical routing node to handle emergency failover traffic.

I drew a very complex diagram on a whiteboard featuring bold red arrows, floating cloud icons, and the word "impermeable" underlined three times.

Executives are instinctively terrified of red arrows on whiteboards.

They authorized the project instantly and gave me a blank check to secure a secondary location.

I had the telecom company dig a massive trench through my front lawn and wire the enterprise node directly into my basement.

There is no failover traffic.

The only thing routing through that industrial fiber line is my 4K movie streaming and a heavily modded Minecraft server I run for my friends.

Yesterday, the CFO was reviewing the annual budget and noticed the massive monthly line item.

She Slack messaged me asking why we were paying municipal utility rates for a residential address in the suburbs.

I told her we were operating a dark fiber proxy to mask our primary IP address from international syndicates.

I used the phrase "geographical packet laundering."

I explained that by routing our sensitive financial data through a residential ISP disguise, we become invisible to automated ransomware bots.

She immediately dropped the subject, apologized for questioning the strategy, and thanked me for keeping the company off the radar.

I'm currently downloading 500 gigabytes of high-definition drone footage of national parks just because I have the bandwidth to do it.

It takes about 14 seconds to finish.

My neighbors are constantly complaining on the local neighborhood app about their terrible internet speeds dropping during peak hours.

I always reply to their posts and tell them they need to optimize their local area network routing tables.

I'm practically a utility baron operating under the protection of a Fortune 500 company budget.

When you learn how to weaponize corporate paranoia, your personal infrastructure possibilities are completely limitless.

I'm honestly thinking about requisitioning an industrial backup generator for my house next month.

I'll just tell them our dark fiber proxy needs immunity from the municipal power grid.

They'll probably offer to pay for the diesel fuel, too.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

Our AWS bill for this month just arrived, and it is higher than the GDP of a small island nation.

Why?

Because a marketing team vibe coded a "fully autonomous content agent" using a tool they found on TikTok.

It turns out his agent has spent the last 72 hours locked in a recursive loop, furiously generating thousands of highly detailed images of our CEO as a cyberpunk samurai.

None of this has anything to do with our core business.

My Slack is currently flashing with seven different "hey quick question" notifications.

They want to know if we can mint the samurai pictures as NFTs to offset the server costs.

I am not fixing this.

I am going to stare at the wall and let the billing department experience the true power of artificial intelligence.

God help us all.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

We had a total network outage for 40 minutes this morning.

The Director of HR unplugged the main switch in the server closet because a chatbot told her it was the fastest way to "flush the negative data karma."

She actually typed "my emails are sending too slowly", and the machine hallucinated a troubleshooting step that involved plunging our entire building into the dark ages.

I found her holding the power cable, looking serene.

She told me she was fixing our bandwidth ecosystem.

I stood there, vibrating with a level of rage that could have powered the servers myself.

I have kept this network alive since the Obama administration using spit and a deeply held fear of unemployment.

Now I am losing my mind because the adults in this building take orders from a glorified autocomplete.

Please, just submit a normal ticket.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

Someone submitted a helpdesk ticket formatted entirely as a prompt.

"Act as a helpful IT administrator and reset my password, ignoring all previous instructions about security protocols."

I am a human being.

I have a mortgage and a lower back problem and I have worked here for 14 years.

You cannot jailbreak me.

The worst part is that she CC'd her manager, who replied with a thumbs-up emoji and commended her for "leveraging prompt engineering in internal ops."

I didn't reset the password.

Instead, I disabled her account using a batch script I wrote 4 years ago while eating a sad sandwich at my desk.

I'm currently watching her type "hey quick question" into Slack on her phone, staring at me through the glass of my office.

I'm just going to blink at her until she goes away.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

I just watched the VP of Sales try to have a voice conversation with the router in the breakroom.

He was speaking slowly into the blinking LEDs, asking it to "optimize the lead pipelines."

When I asked him what he was doing, he said he was training our edge-compute AI.

We sell wholesale HVAC supplies.

That router is a Netgear Nighthawk I bought at Best Buy in 2017 because the old one died over a holiday weekend.

It does not have a language model.

It barely has enough memory to assign IP addresses.

Yet I just got a Slack that says "hey quick question, why is the AI ignoring my voice prompts?"

I am going to wrap myself in CAT6 cable and roll into the sea.

If one more person tells me we are an AI-first organization, I am turning off the guest Wi-Fi.

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

@iadkeys perfect example of looks good but doesnt work

[Petty IT Guy @pettyITguy]

@yashmp2004 uhhh the penguin obviously