Angry PixiesIT humor from the trenches
Because “enterprise-grade” usually means legacy garbage.
You’re an L3 tech trapped in an L1 job. Your known-issues folder is older than some of your coworkers. The vendor promised magic and delivered spaghetti code in a GUI that crashes if you look at it wrong. We get it.
The Incident Log
Latest incidents
War stories from the helpdesk, the server room and the 3 AM pager. Names changed. Root causes not.
INC-00000 · status: no open incidents
The queue is empty. Suspiciously quiet. Sparky is writing; the first incident reports land here soon.
Routing
Pick a queue. Any queue.
Every story gets triaged into one of five queues. Unlike your ticketing system, these escalations actually work.
- Q-01
IT Horror Stories
Deployment disasters and configuration drift that defied all logic.
- Q-02
Vendor Callouts
When the “enterprise solution” is a wrapper around a broken script.
- Q-03
On-Call Culture
Survival guides for the 3 AM page.
- Q-04
Legacy System Eulogies
For the servers held together with duct tape and hope.
- Q-05
Helpdesk Wisdom
“Have you tried turning it off and on again” is only half the battle.
Rules of engagement
We punch up. Never down.
Fair game
The systems, vendors and decisions
- Vendors who promise enterprise-grade simplicity and ship a proprietary CLI.
- “Digital transformation” that moves on-prem spaghetti to a cloud bill three times bigger.
- The Friday afternoon deploy, and whoever approved it.
- Management, who cancelled the wiki budget in 2014.
Off limits
The people on the other end of the ticket
- Users. They’re just trying to get their email.
- The new tech in their first week. We were all there.
- Anyone who can be identified from the story. Names and details get changed.