Petty IT Guy

Vacuuming started at 9:06 Sunday when my roommate asked me to move the router cabinet so he could get behind it. The cabinet weighs less than a suitcase. I told him shifting network equipment could trigger “cable memory stress” if the cords had settled into their current bends. He asked whether cables have memory. I said not in the human sense. That was enough science for him. I photographed the back of the cabinet, unplugged nothing, and said we needed a before-state before any physical change. Then I opened the router page and watched the connection graph for 10 minutes. Nothing moved. He vacuumed around the cabinet and gave up on the last 8 inches. I returned to the couch. The cables retained their memories. So did I, specifically the memory of not helping.

Right before lunch, our head of HR said everyone needed to record a 30-second video introduction for the new employee directory. Recording myself required finding a quiet room and pretending to have enthusiasm. I told her simultaneous video uploads could create “profile freshness conflicts” if the directory processed old photos and new clips together. She asked whether my account had shown a conflict. I said the responsible approach was to avoid creating one. That’s a very polished way to say no. I updated my text bio instead and asked her to use it as the stable reference. She agreed to delay my video until the directory finished processing everyone else. Two weeks passed. The launch happened without mine. My profile now contains 3 sentences and no moving image. I successfully preserved freshness by refusing to become fresher.

The grocery store changed pickup so customers had to park in numbered spots and enter the number in the app. I pulled into spot 6 and realized the sign was outside the passenger window. Reading it required leaning over. I called the store associate and said the app appeared to have a “parking position mismatch” because my location marker wasn’t aligning with the pickup zone. She asked which spot I was in. I said identifying it manually might overwrite the bad location evidence. That concern was invented to protect my spine from 1 lean. She told me to stay put while she walked outside. She found my car, entered the spot herself, and loaded the bags. I thanked her for preserving the mismatch. The app still worked. I drove home with groceries and an untouched passenger seat. Position evidence remained uncompromised.

Thursday at 2:00, a vendor manager dropped a 90-minute product training onto my calendar. Attendance included a quiz. I don’t trust any meeting that grades me. I told her mandatory quizzes could create “memory contamination” because employees might learn the test answers instead of the product. She asked what I recommended. I said we should separate exposure from evaluation and let the first group watch only. I was the first group. The theory exists solely because I didn’t want homework. I attended for 12 minutes, confirmed the video played, and marked myself OBSERVATION ONLY. She pushed my quiz to the next training cycle so the pilot stayed clean. The next cycle was canceled after the vendor changed the course. I completed the entire certification path by becoming statistically inconvenient. My final status still says PENDING CLEAN SAMPLE.

At the airport hotel, checkout was at 11 and my flight wasn’t until 5:40. The front desk clerk said I’d need to bring my suitcase downstairs before lunch. I wanted 3 more hours of room-based television. I told her my luggage contained devices undergoing “travel power settling” after an overnight charge. She asked whether moving them was unsafe. I said early movement could make battery readings unreliable. That explanation has no relationship with physics. I plugged my laptop into the wall, opened the battery screen, and showed her 100%. She offered a late checkout so I wouldn’t disturb the process. I accepted 2:00 as the minimum safe window. At 1:58, I unplugged everything and left. The devices survived. More importantly, I finished the movie with 2 minutes to spare and zero hallway time.

During a 2:20 support meeting, our helpdesk director announced everyone would start shadowing 1 live call per week. Listening to strangers troubleshoot microphones felt dangerously close to work. I told him shadowing could create “observer response distortion” because users behave differently when an extra technician joins. He asked whether I had evidence. I said the cleanest comparison required a no-observer group. The phrase sounds academic because I wanted to be absent. I volunteered to establish the control group by not joining any calls for 4 weeks. He approved the test and asked me to document outcomes. I created a spreadsheet with 4 rows labeled NO OBSERVER and left them blank. Nobody noticed a difference in ticket resolution. The pilot ended. I preserved support quality through controlled nonparticipation. The spreadsheet is still the strongest evidence I’ve produced all quarter.

My daughter joined a soccer league that required parents to volunteer for 4 games. The available jobs were coaching, concessions, field setup, and scoreboard. I chose scoreboard. I assumed it meant pressing 2 buttons. It did. The problem was they expected me to sit there for 90 minutes. At the second game I looked at the scoreboard controller. It used a basic serial connection. By Game 3 I'd connected an old Raspberry Pi and written a tiny web interface. Now I could update the score from my phone. The league commissioner thought this was incredible. He asked if I could automate the game clock too. I did. Then substitutions. Then team names. By the end of the season every field was using my setup. The league thanked me for “transforming match operations.” Next season they waived my volunteer requirement. I built an entire sports technology platform so I wouldn't have to sit in a folding chair.

By noon Saturday, my partner had opened every cabinet because we were supposed to reorganize the kitchen. There were 11 mugs on the counter and I was losing daylight for television. I said the smart speaker, oven clock, and grocery display created a “shared household timing chain” and moving powered devices could disrupt their order. She asked what the mugs had to do with that. I said we shouldn’t mix physical changes with device changes during the same window. That rule was born in my head 4 seconds earlier. I unplugged the grocery display, plugged it back in, and declared the kitchen under observation. She stopped moving things so she wouldn’t interfere. I watched 2 episodes while the countertop remained untouched. By dinner, we both forgot the cabinet project. The mugs returned to the exact shelves they had apparently been threatening all morning.

Three minutes into Monday’s all-hands rehearsal, our communications lead said every presenter needed to stay afterward for a full technical run-through. I had already tested my slide. I told her repeated rehearsals could create “presentation state drift” if different versions were opened too many times. She asked whether the deck could actually change. I said the risk was less about change and more about uncertainty. That answer was built entirely from confidence. I suggested we freeze the current file and only test presenters whose slides had failed. She agreed because nobody wanted to be responsible for introducing drift. I exported my single slide as a PDF and marked it VERIFIED. Everyone else stayed for 47 minutes. I left through the side door with a granola bar. The final deck worked perfectly. My contribution remained exactly 1 frozen rectangle.

The apartment garage emailed at 6:41 saying my parking spot had to be cleared for pressure washing. Clearing it meant moving my car 3 blocks before breakfast. I told the building manager the car was currently part of a “fixed-location access reference” and relocating it could break the garage entry baseline. He asked what baseline I meant. I said the gate learns expected vehicle position over time. It does not. I opened the parking app, took a screenshot of my assigned space, and sent it with the subject CURRENT STATE. He paused the cleaning around my spot until the vendor could confirm the gate behavior. Nobody confirmed anything. The crew washed every space except mine. I stayed upstairs eating cereal. My car spent the morning inside a tiny unverified zone that happened to contain the only dry concrete in the garage.

"Live handoff required" appeared on 3 Friday afternoons after an operations manager changed the project process. I was on the calendar for 3 Fridays. I told him live handoffs could create a “spoken detail override” where verbal updates conflicted with the written record. He asked which version would win. I said that uncertainty was the risk. There is no spoken detail override. I proposed a safer process where the outgoing person posts one final written summary and the incoming person replies RECEIVED. He liked the audit trail. I wrote a template with 5 fields and scheduled my summaries for 3:45. The meetings disappeared from the calendar. At 3:46 Friday, my replacement replied RECEIVED. At 3:47, I was already in the elevator. The written record was extremely clear about my availability.

Sunday night, my sister asked me to help set up the school pickup app for my nephew before Monday. The app wanted a photo, vehicle details, and 2 emergency contacts. I wanted to finish a documentary. I told her entering all 3 categories at once could create a “pickup identity merge” if the school matched records too quickly. She asked whether that had happened before. I said I’d seen similar systems confuse household roles. I haven’t. For remediation, I entered only the vehicle color and saved the draft. Then I told her we should let that field settle before adding people. She called the school. A front-office coordinator told her parents could still show a driver’s license at pickup. She decided that was easier and abandoned the app. I contributed one color field and saved an entire family from onboarding. The documentary was excellent.

A security coordinator wanted everyone on my team to inspect 40 shared folders and confirm who still needed access. The review was due Friday. I wanted Friday to end at lunch. I told her editing permissions during a live review could create an “ownership handoff shadow” where removed names disappeared before responsibility was reassigned. She asked what the safe order was. I said first we needed a frozen reference copy. I exported the folder list, saved it as BEFORE CHANGES, and did nothing else. The phrase ownership handoff shadow came from nowhere. She postponed permission changes until each owner could confirm the reference copy. Three owners were out. The deadline moved to next week. At 12:07 Friday, I marked the task BLOCKED BY OWNERSHIP CONFIRMATION. Then I closed my laptop. The shadow lifted Monday morning when I felt like working.

My roommate bought a universal remote and wanted to reprogram the entire living room Saturday afternoon. I was using the television. I told him changing every device code in one session could create a “shared control collision.” He asked if that could break anything. I said it could leave us unable to determine which device had accepted which command. That’s mostly a description of being bad at setting up a remote. I suggested we test only the volume buttons first. He pressed volume up twice. The television got louder. I wrote VERIFIED beside VOL+ in the notes app and said we should stop before introducing another variable. He went to make lunch. I kept the old remote beside me and never resumed testing. The universal remote has been on the coffee table for 3 weeks. Our control collision remains successfully contained.

At 9:18, an HR coordinator put mandatory employee profile-photo retakes on everyone's calendar. The photo station was in another building. I asked her whether replacing everyone’s images at once could cause “identity picture drift” between internal systems. She asked what drift looked like. I said older approvals might still display the previous image and create uncertainty during verification. I made that problem up before finishing the sentence. For remediation, I suggested testing the new photos on volunteers first. She asked if I’d volunteer. I said that would defeat the control because my existing photo was already widely cached. She accepted that logic with alarming speed. Two weeks later, the directory project launched without requiring retakes from anyone whose old photo was “still serviceable.” Mine is 5 years old. Apparently laziness is now an identity continuity strategy.

My airline app told me to verify my passport the night before a trip. The passport was 14 feet away in my bedroom. I was already on the couch. I opened the camera screen, covered the lens with my thumb, and got an error. Then I told my partner the app had entered a “document image retry lock” and repeated attempts could delay check-in. She asked whether we should call the airline. I said the safest option was to stop touching it until morning. There is no retry lock. I closed the app and resumed the movie. At the airport, an agent scanned my passport in about 8 seconds and said everything was fine. My partner asked why we hadn’t just done that online. I said in-person verification had cleared the lock. The lock mysteriously resolved exactly where I was already going.

Guys I’m hearing the PHP vulnerability may affect Jira, so out of an abundance of caution I think we should take Jira offline indefinitely.

Facilities told me my desk was moving 3 rows over so a new team could sit together. The new desk was farther from the kitchen. I said my current setup had developed a “location-linked device baseline” and moving everything at once could obscure intermittent hardware faults. A facilities coordinator asked whether anything was currently broken. I said that was exactly why the baseline mattered. It doesn’t. I put 3 pieces of masking tape around my dock, monitor stand, and power strip and labeled them POSITION A, B, and C. She photographed the setup and postponed the move until IT could confirm the relocation procedure. Nobody asked IT. The new team sat around me instead. I kept the closer kitchen route and gained 6 coworkers who now think my desk is some kind of test environment. I don’t correct operational assumptions that improve snack access.

Halfway through laundry, my downstairs neighbor texted that my clothes had finished and asked me to free the washer. Going downstairs meant putting on pants. I replied that the machine needed a “post-cycle load settling window” before the door should be opened. She asked how long that was. I said 20 minutes. A washing machine has no such window. I set a timer for 20 minutes, ignored it, and started another episode. She texted again at minute 31. I told her the longer interval actually reduced the chance of an unbalanced restart. Then I walked downstairs, opened the washer, and moved everything into a basket without folding a single item. She got the machine. I got another hour before dealing with the basket. The clothes are still in it. I consider that long-term fabric storage.

A customer support lead decided every unresolved ticket older than 10 days needed a phone call before closure. I had 27 of them. Calling 27 strangers sounded like a hostile use of a Tuesday. I warned her that outbound calls could trigger “contact-state reset” if users answered after long periods of inactivity. She asked what state would reset. I said the original problem context. That explanation has no technical foundation whatsoever. I proposed sending one standardized email first and waiting 48 hours for a response. She approved it as a safer sequence. I sent the same 2 sentences to all 27 users and marked them PENDING USER CONFIRMATION. Twenty-four never replied. She let me close those without calling because the written record was cleaner. I avoided 24 conversations by creating a communication policy around my dislike of communication.