There were thousand tickets in the backlog, and I was on the trail of a weird printer issue. I had a suspect, but that wasn't enough to close the ticket. I'm Anonymous. This is my story.

Whenever you hit the Print button, a request launches into the ether. “Print one copy of this file, double-sided.”

But you can’t just chuck it out there aimlessly. You gotta tell it where to go. So that’s why we have Internet Protocol, or IP. Every computer, every printer, every device on every network has one or more IP addresses for different operations. They’re just like the address you scribble on the envelope holding Grandma’s Christmas card. Send your print request to the right IP, and you’re in business. Send it to the wrong IP, and they’ll be shaking their heads on the other end. “Print? But all I know how to do is tell you the weather!”

As for what happens next, you’re at the mercy of the program’s error handling. If you’re lucky, they’ll send a detailed error message. If you’re not, they could ignore you, act up in weird ways, or completely self-destruct in a violent crash.

I was neck-deep in a Tech Support ticket concerning a printer in Human Resources. Not only was Grandma’s Christmas card landing in Pluto, the Plutonians were writing back, in the form of mysterious complaints that were nothing like the documents the printer had been tasked with.

My troubleshooting hadn’t shot much trouble at all, so I’d bugged some friends for ideas. Reynaldo had been reminded of an old, retired HR program for logging anonymous employee complaints. While our developer friend Megan quit our icy outdoor break spot to dig up dirt from the software side of things, Reynaldo and I went to his cubicle to trace IPs. He suspected a conflict … and that’s just what his command-line requests revealed. We leaned over his laptop together, studying a couple of terminal windows and their cryptic output to his even-more-cryptic inputs.

“Whenever that printer got set up in HR, it received an IP that was already in use by this server—” he jabbed an index finger at the relevant part of the screen “—which is apparently still up and running, even though I swear it was decommissioned.” Reynaldo frowned. “Who wants to bet that stupid complaint program has some kind of ability to print cached complaints?”

I frowned, too. “We won’t know for sure unless Megan digs something up.”

Reynaldo flashed me a look of pure cynicism. It wasn’t an indictment of Megan’s skill, more skepticism toward the idea of anyone having properly documented this mess. We had better odds of hitting a billion-dollar jackpot.

I sighed. “It’s an easy workaround, at least: assign the printer a new IP. But we’ve got bigger problems here. Why’s this zombie server still up and kicking? Why’d an IP conflict ever occur in the first place?”

“Don’t get me started on our FUBAR IP allocation and tracking.” Reynaldo’s lowered voice contained plenty of venom. “We’re talking multiple pools to track, multiple spreadsheets that have to be manually edited. Problems that are easy enough to fix! Why spend money on honest-to-goodness network management software?”

Short-term budgeting preventing long-term improvements: a damned shame we’d both seen all too many times. Being a tech support drone, having an innate desire to help that no amount of baloney could stamp out, I once more found myself longing to fix the unfixable.

“In my ticket notes, I’ll make noise about a more permanent solution,” I said. “At the very least, some bigwig oughta leap at the chance to save 3 cents of electricity a year by putting the complaint-spewing server out of its misery.”

I’d already resolved to contact Leila, the new head of HR, about this ticket. She needed to hear about Hothead, the manager-type who, in a fit of frustration, had taken a hair dryer to the same printer and nearly trashed it. I could also tell her about these lingering network vulnerabilities that would continue causing problems for everyone down the line.

I decided to do it without telling Reynaldo. I had the feeling that if I let him in on it, his eyes would roll clear out of his skull.

Working from Reynaldo’s cube, I assigned the HR printer a new IP address and once again cleared its queue. Then I sent Tony, the ticket holder, a private message asking him to give printing another go. I felt pretty good about his chances, but I’d wait for him to give me the all-clear before closing the ticket.

With the messaging app still open on my phone, I saw that Megan had invited me to drop by her cube. From Networking Central, I hoofed it up to Developers’ Row.

Megan’s cube was a familiar spot filled with bright, cartoony posters and figurines, the only splashes of color for miles. The titles and characters drew blanks in my over-the-hill brain. I kept meaning to ask her what they were, why she liked them. Another time, maybe. I found her with her back toward me, leaning intently in her swivel-chair toward the single monitor over her laptop docking station.

“Now a good time?” I asked under my breath.

She whirled around, tense, then relaxed with a smile, her gaze livelier than I’d seen it in a while. She picked up a small external memory stick from her desk to proffer my way. “That’s the HR application’s source code!” she murmured in conspiratorial fashion. “Guess where it came from?”

I smirked. “I know the answer should be ‘a code repository,’ but in this joint, that’s asking too much.”

“You’re right!” she replied. “It was never in a repo, never in source control. It lived and died on one dev’s local machine, a dev who retired way before I got here. His successor hung onto all the old code from that guy’s machine, just in case. But yeah, we don’t officially support the application anymore.”

Megan turned around, using her keyboard to tab over to an open window in a code editor. From over her shoulder, I saw line after line of an archaic programming language that the Egyptians might’ve used to build the pyramids.

“This code’s an undocumented disaster,” she said.

“There was an IP conflict at that,” I told her. “The print requests were going to a server that’s still running this thing. We assigned the printer a new IP, but the mystery server remains a head-scratcher.”

“I’ll trace through and figure out what it does when it gets a print request. Improve its error-handling in general,” Megan promised, more excited than daunted by the prospect. “I mean, if it is still up and running, I could tweak, recompile, and redeploy it so it doesn’t—”

Insistent metallic knocks sounded behind us. “Excuse me!”

It was the sort of pointed voice that somehow ignored your ears and stabbed into your gut instead. Megan froze, tense. I turned to find a woman at the threshold with the bearing of a vindictive hall monitor, rapping a fist against the cube’s bare metal frame.

She leveled a withering frown at Megan. “I was hoping for a status update on the Hewville refresh! Did I hear you say you were planning to work on something else?” The question sounded more like a threat.

This had to be Megan’s boss. Megan remained tense from head to foot. “I—”

“I need you to focus on your assigned projects. The things you can actually bill your time against.” After delivering the condescending reminder, the boss’ glare shifted my way. “And you are?”

I shoved unease aside and put on the game face I’d spent decades perfecting. “Tech Support. I meant no harm, ma’am. I was just asking Megan for help with an open support ticket.”

“She doesn’t have time for that!” the boss scolded. “If you truly need help from this department, then you must escalate your ticket through the proper channels.”

I already knew how that went: pulling together screenshots, logs, and other detailed information, only to receive half of a sentence fragment a few days later, asking for something I’d sent with the first message. In this case, I knew someone would just wag a finger at me about the HR application being out of support. Thanks but no thanks.

Megan struggled to muster one last defense. “This program’s still running on a server somewhere!”

“For changes to existing code, the proper procedure is to file a formal change request through the Project Management Team. The PMT will create a billing code and assign appropriate resources, if they deem it a proper use of development time.” The boss then looked at me like I was a used tissue she was ready to throw in the trash. “If that’s all, I suggest you head back to Tech Support, Mr. … ?”

No way was I handing her my name on a platter. I tried to glance Megan’s way, but she was staring at her lap. I felt bad leaving her in that lurch, but staying would only make things worse for the both of us.

“Later,” I said, both a goodbye and a promise.

I got the hell out of Devsville, slipping down flight after flight of stairs with a lead weight in my chest. For a moment, Megan had brightened in the face of a collaborative challenge. I’d felt a little more alive, too.

Thank God someone had been there to make sure no one helped each other.

The same sicknesses plagued the joint year after year. Almighty budgets. Status quo worship. Hierarchy and miles of red tape. Promising young people like Megan had their spirits crushed, and schmucks like me just put their heads down. Still a huge pile of other support tickets waiting for me, after all.

The frustration and resentment, the desire to do something to fix this, burned in my chest like a bonfire.

Back at my desk, I found a message from Tony confirming the new printer was behaving at last. Bolstered by my friends’ findings, I closed his ticket with notes about how the resolution was only a band-aid on a gaping wound. I messaged Megan, too, thanking her for trying.

And with that emotional bonfire still raging, I settled in and typed out a long email to Leila, detailing in full the most recent shenanigans I’d been a part of.

By the time I finished, I had one bit of good news: Aggie, my old mentor who’d turned manager a few years back, had accepted my meeting request to meet the next afternoon.

She wasn’t my boss, which meant it was still safe to vent her way. I had every intention. My resentment would no longer let itself be buried under this or that technical hiccup. It was insisting upon action.

The next day, I walked to the downtown coffee shop well ahead of the appointed time, glad to have the excuse to be somewhere else. Bought myself a drink and sat down where I could watch the door.

Five minutes late turned into ten … then twenty. No Aggie.

It was totally unlike her. Sure, she’d canceled last-minute before, but she’d always got in touch with me to let me know.

Caffeine jitters fueled a fear I couldn’t shake off. I sent PMs and left voicemails on her cell and work phones, asking her to respond when she could. Back at work, I asked around the department, including my boss.

She’d been AWOL the whole day. No one knew what was up.

Hours of work still stretched in front of me. I could barely sit in my chair, much less look at my monitor.

Just call me, Aggie, I willed, staring at the cell phone clutched in my hand.

She didn’t. Not that afternoon, not that evening. Beneath my fear was this strange gut feeling, this knowing sense that my worries were justified. It was crazy, but there was no talking myself out of it.

Early the next morning, they roped the whole department into the big conference room. Nobody knew what was going on until a small, ashen group of managers, directors, and directors of directors filed to the front and called for attention.

I already knew, deep down, what was coming.

“We’ve we received some very unfortunate news,” one of the senior directors spoke. “Agatha Shaw … passed away in her home after a heart attack.”

A few gasps escaped the assembly. Otherwise, you could’ve heard a pin drop. Wide-eyed looks of shock surged through us like lightning.

Aggie.

My gut had known all along, but my brain still wasn’t having it. Somebody somewhere must have goofed up royal, I thought. Happens all the time in this joint. Aggie had more life and fight in her than I ever did. I—

“Those of you who reported directly to Ms. Shaw will report to Bill Watson for now,” the director continued. “Dismissed.”

The brass began showing themselves out.

The rest of us just sat there, too stunned to move. That’s it? I marveled. No memorial? No counseling? No time off? Not one drip of sympathy?

I could only look on helplessly as Bill Watson, my boss, walked right over to me. He put his hand on my shoulder, leaned over, and muttered into my ear: “My office.”

While my brain reeled, my feet stood me up obediently. They marched me right off to the next chair I dropped into, the one opposite the large desk in Bill’s office.

He settled in on his side. “It’s a real shame about Aggie. We’re screwed without her.”

I just sat there, still reeling.

”My manager is looking for someone to step up in a big way.” Bill nodded in my direction. “You’re ready. You deserve it. Her direct reports are reporting to me for now; over the next few months, I’m transitioning them to you. The promotion will follow, as soon as the next performance review comes around!”

We were just cogs in that joint. Never before had the point been driven home so viscerally. Righteous rage surged up from within, clearing my brain and shooting strength through my limbs. I jumped out of that chair and glared down at him. “Hell no! Find someone else!”

I got the hell out of there and dragged myself all the way home to collapse on my couch.


To be continued ...

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