carl@fire

The forty nine year-old father frowned as he continued to consider the matter. It's not like I'd wanna go back to hardcore raiding or anything. I don't have the time or energy for that. Or the patience, honestly. But it'd be nice to be able to fish at home a little bit, or maybe try playing with Bobby on occasion to see what she's up to. Pop in on her to drop a good dad joke during a boss fight and then log out before she can reply. That kinda thing.

Carl sighed as he watched one cloud pass overhead, then another. He closed his eyes for a moment. As per usual, his pending to-do list began to creep into his thoughts, slowly immersing him in his plan to finish auditing the network security for the different department systems, the monthly operating system update he'd be rolling out the following week, the candidates he was looking at to fill a Senior Network Engineer role, the—He pushed those thoughts away.

He opened his eyes a little while later to resume his cloud watching. I guess I can at least message Bobby if she logs on tonight and tell her what happened. Not something I'd leave for her in an offline message, that's for sure.

It'll be a little weird for Annie to find me in a pickle like this, but I can just pass it off as some IT thing. I mean, I've got all the logs for the DB stuff and all the other late-night work I've been doing, so it's not like she'll think I've been staying late to play games. She's resourceful enough, so I'm sure she can find someone to come in and unplug me. Or storm the place and browbeat security into coming to check on me.

The Director of IT for Fire Entertainment, the most prestigious gaming company in history, grimaced. Ugh, if I'm in game for that long I'm probably gonna piss my pants. Not really the way I want to be found…

Carl sat up and looked around. Some amount of time had passed. An hour, judging by his latest time diff from the console. Must be around nine thirty out there. Bobby'll probably log on soon if she's gonna play tonight. His friends list remained open in front of him.

Ir'alith Whitetop Mountains

BobTheGreatest Offline

➤ FE 0/2 Online

Huh, Ir'alith's still in that mountain zone. Wonder what she'd be getting up to in a place like that. Maybe there's some Shadow Mountain or Dark Cliff of Death that she role-plays at. Carl cracked a smile. Nah, it'd have to be edgier, wouldn't it. Maybe… Peak of Eternal Misery? He chuckled. "Yeah, that's gotta be the one," he said to himself, laughing a little harder. If it was the me from twenty-something years ago, that could've been me there.

Another cloud passed by. This would've been a lot easier to get out of if I had the home account names for anyone at the office. I've only got Larry and Tony's dev accounts from that time they wanted to go fishing with the ol' bossman and Engineering warped us on top of some ultraboss they were testing.

Carl chuckled again. Wasn't that funny at the time, but I guess it must've been pretty hilarious if they were listening in when we were trying to run away. What was it called again? Dak-something? Whatever. Always check my dev mode bit before I log in now, though. Lucky thing, too, or else being stuck here would be a lot less…fun…

An idea caused him to stroke his beard thoughtfully. I could have some fun as long as I have to be in this game, couldn't I. I mean, it's not like I can stop playing now even if I wanted to. He nodded to himself, the idea beginning to change into a plan.

Yeah, maybe I'll try it out. Game's got however many tens—hundreds, actually—of millions of players, even pretty close to an even gender ratio of the players from what I heard; it's gotta be pretty good, right? The fishing is unbelievably realistic. Honestly might be better than real fishing with all the crazy types of fish. There was that one that shot lightning out of its antennae, the dragon-fish-thing that tried to burn my face off, even that one really bright fish that I couldn't look directly at. Who even makes a fish you can't look at? Bobby said it was some kinda holy-whatever, but I'm calling bull on that design. A man's gotta be able to admire his catch, Greg. Better add that to the list while I think of it.

He did.

I've still got the coordinates for that little starter town in a file here somewhere… Carl typed a command on his keyboard and listed all the files in his home directory.

There were…a few…

Carl frowned. I really gotta clean this up sometime. Even slows down the save dialogs when they try to load. He tried listing again, filtering by file extension. Gah, wait, I never use extensions when I'm saving notes. He changed the filter to exclude files with extensions as well as directories. Alright, this is a little ridiculous. Still over a hundred files. Time to add a note in my todo for future-Carl to power through and…

He thought about it. Well, I guess it's not like I'm doing anything now. Either Bobby's gonna log on in the next few minutes or it's gonna be a while. Let's see:

todo-jan - why do I still have this?

todo-feb - really?

todo-mar - jesus, man, get a hold of yourself and have some dignity in your home directory organization!

Alright, these go back pretty far so I'm just gonna glob 'em and archive just in case I think of a reason why I might've saved 'em. Actually kinda surprising I didn't have a plain todo file considering how many of these things there are.

He moved his eyes to another group of similarly-named files.

meetingnotes-07-08

meetingnotes-07-15

meetingnotes-07-22

meetingnotes-07-29

meetingnotes-08-05

meetingnotes-08-12

meetingnotes-08-19

meetingnotes-08-26

meetingnotes-09-02

meetingnotes-09-09

meetingnotes-09-16

meetingnotes-09-23

meetingnotes-09-30

meetingnotes-10-07

meetingnotes-10-08

meetingnotes-10-15

meetingnotes-10-22

meetingnotes-10-29

meetingnotes-11-05

meetingnotes-11-12

meetingnotes-11-19

meetingnotes-12-03

meetingnotes-12-10

meetingnotes-12-17

meetingnotes2-01-07

Ughhhh how many meetingnotes* files are there?! I could've sworn I was pruning these! Okay, so that's like, at least another fifty files I don't care about anymore now that those are all tarred and zipped up, but I haven't even started on directories—or files with extensions…

That didn't take nearly as long as I expected. Only a little over half an hour. Carl surveyed the cleaned-up listing for his home directory with satisfaction. Who says time spent in games is useless? This is gonna save me like, ten freaking minutes of save dialog loading next week from all the presentation docs I always gotta save out of my emails. Across the rest of the year that's hours I've just saved myself!

Carl grinned smugly. Yeah, nobody beats me when it comes to efficiency. I'll add a note to figure out a login script later to…

He thought about it. Well, it's not like I'm in a rush to start playing games again or anything. May as well tackle this now, too. Something like this right into my zshrc…

#only execute in interactive shells

if [[ $- == *i* ]] ; then

#homedir cleanups: use 60day mtime for "old"

#clean up known garbage

for f in ~/*

Carl stopped typing. A for loop? C'mon, Carl. Are you the Director of IT or a freaking intern? He deleted the previous two lines and started over.

#only execute in interactive shells

if [[ $- == *i* ]] ; then

#homedir cleanups: use 60day mtime for "old"

#warn about pending garbage

print -l "PENDING DELETION" ~/*~*.*(.m+55m-60)

#clean up known garbage

rm -f ~/*~*.*(.m+60)

#maybe clean up probable non-archived garbage

rm -i ~/*.*~*.gz*(.m+60)

#archive this stuff already!

print -l "ARCHIVE THESE!" ~/*(/m+60)

fi

Carl nodded to himself, a slow smile spreading across his face. Yeah, now we're talking. Don't need to write myself a note for something that's only gonna take me a minute of throwing extended globs together.

Then he thought about it. Gah, I just wasted all that time manually looking through all that old crap! Could've just—He ran his hands up through his beard and into his hair. Nope, not gonna get upset about this. Still saved future-Carl hours of time. He's gonna look back and be like, "Past-Carl was a pretty cool guy."

Carl's smile returned. "Past-Carl was a pretty cool guy," he said to himself. I'll comment it out until I get out of here so I can double-check and make sure I didn't miss anything important that's gonna get deleted. Better add a quick note about that.

He decided to check the time again. Getting kinda late in the afternoon. What is it, almost ten thirty at home or something now? He glanced at his friends list.

Ir'alith Whitetop Mountains

BobTheGreatest Offline

➤ FE 0/2 Online

I guess I'd get a system notification if she came online, huh. Never actually happened before since I only play when she's at school, but that's how it's supposed to work. Better stop looking. Just gonna make me all antsy. "Dismiss," he called.

His friends list window closed.

Carl took a breath. Anything else that needs cleaning up? He checked his home directory over again, finding nothing amiss. Maybe I should think about some kind of company-wide policy for this. I bet there's other people who lose time to it. Better add a note in the to-do so I can think about it later…

"Inventory," he called once his note-taking was completed. Everything's in order here, too. "Dismiss."

He hesitated.

It's not like I'm afraid to really play a game after all this time or anything. That'd be ridiculous, wouldn't it. He forced out a laugh. "Yeah, I'm not afraid of some game. Me, Carl Weathers, afraid to play a game? Pfft."

He still didn't stand up or make any move to leave.

Carl chewed on the corner of his lip. Alright, maybe I'm a little nervous. I mean, what if I get addicted or something, and then I start trying to play all the time when I get out, and I stop showing up to work and being there for the girls because I'm just in the game all the time, and then Annie would…

He frowned deeply. No, she'd never let it get that bad. She could've left me instead of giving me that ultimatum. And I'm not the same guy anymore, either. I'm a lot better than I was. More responsible. I'd never let it get that bad. He started nodding to himself. Yeah. Yeah! Getting a big hug from one of the girls when I get home from a long day at work is better than I ever felt from raiding or whatever. No chance I'd ever give that up.

Thus resolved, he grabbed his glowing fishing r—spear and pushed himself to his feet with it. I'll just see what it's about. Plus, Bobby's for sure gonna want to hear some kind of story about what I did when I couldn't log out. Making something up to tell to a thirteen year-old feels less like Santa and the Easter Bunny and more like flat out lying.

Carl looked around. He really looked. "Hm," he said. "Where the heck am I, anyway?" He tried to find something that could be a landmark, but there was nothing around save for the empty basin where his favorite lake used to be. Not going to be much of a story if I can't even figure out where I'm starting from. Well, whatever. She's been playing for a while. If I describe it as a huge lake with orange, horned fish then she'll probably recognize it or be able to ask someone who will. Or I can check that dev map again once I'm out and pay attention to the name this time…

He stuck his fishing spear point-first into the soft ground next to him, then created another shell with a dbadmin-privileged database prompt—using the sixty four character password that he'd composed himself, of course—and started keying in an update to his character that would change his location back to the starting town. His fingers stopped before he hit the Enter key but after he'd triple-checked what he'd typed for errors. Then he erased the command. If I'm really gonna try playing the game, then I guess I should probably change my stats and level back, too. Can't turn off dev mode in-game, so it's not going to be much of a challenge, but at least I won't be stupidly overpowered and trivialize all the content. He looked down at his outfit, which had ripped a bit during his inadvertent foray into the bottom of the dried-up lake. There were still some splinters hanging off him. Probably should equip some nicer-looking gear, too. I've still got that novelty suit that Bobby crafted for me, which'll at least be something.

Carl executed a new database update that he'd triple-checked, closed the shell he'd used to run the update in according to his self-imposed notion of how elevated privilege access should be handled, then selected the relevant table entries in another prompt once again to verify, even though the previous command had not returned an error—which it obviously wouldn't because he didn't make typos, and he always triple-checked commands that he executed with elevated privileges. He only checked using the database to be extra sure.

It wasn't that he didn't know how to check his stats normally.

Carl was the Director of IT, not to mention a former legendary power gamer.

Of course he knew how to check his character's stats.

He could say the keyword—or words—at any time with confidence and not be at all embarrassed if he accidentally said the wrong word—or words—and nothing happened.

He looked at the console.

Name: Carl

Pronouns: He/Him

Title: IT Director

Level: 1

Health: 100

Strength: 10

Agility: 10

Stamina: 10

Intelligence: 10

Wisdom: 10

Developer: Enabled

Are those even reasonable stats for level one? Carl considered it. I should probably also check… He tried to pick up his fishing spear, but it wouldn't budge. "Inspect," he said, bringing up the item's status window for the first time.

Name: Fishing Spear of the Sea God

Durability: ∞

Required Level: 1600

Required Strength: 250,000

He stopped reading. "Dismiss," he said, suddenly feeling like he was min-maxing before a raid again. Are those even numbers you can reach as a regular player? And there's no way I could've equipped it anyway if my strength was only sixty nine before. He tried to think back to a few months earlier in the year when he'd given it to himself. He'd been having an especially trying week and needed to try something even remotely entertaining at lunch, he recalled. It had been a simple database update, just like the few he'd made that night. Probably because I force-equipped it by updating the DB directly. He rolled his eyes. Always something with this game. Roger's dumb new kid messing with my stats didn't unequip it, but when I do it then everything breaks.

"Well, it's not like I'm gonna give up my fishing rod," he muttered as he fired up a new shell and keyed in the exact same sequence of keys—including the same sixty four character password, though that was merely a coincidence in this case since he rotated his impossible-to-crack password biannually just like everyone else—to trigger the same update he'd used the last time he'd changed his fishing equipment. He triple-checked what he typed, then hit Enter, held control and pressed D twice to log out of the new shell, and grabbed for the fishing r—spear once more.

Gah, why does it have to be a spear! It came up easily, feeling just as light as it always did. "Cool," he said to himself, trying to spin it around in his hand like he'd seen in a movie.

He walked over and picked the spear up again out of the small crater it had made when it flew out of his hand and landed in the soft sand, prodding with his feet as he walked in case there were any other hidden pockets of air underground like the one that the spear must have landed on. The soon-to-be player of games eyed the sand suspiciously, then moved up farther onto the shore.

Just to be extra safe.