carl@fire

Whatever else he was, it seemed that Charles Massey was a great gambler.

About twenty minutes had passed since the whole thing kicked off, but the Thursday afternoon slowdown had come and gone just like usual.

Carl was pleased, but he was also frustrated. It was past-Carl's fault that he'd been put in this position now, and he wasn't accustomed to blaming past-Carl for anything.

Past-Carl was usually a pretty cool guy.

On this occasion, however, past-Carl had continued to push off a known issue for well over a year just because it seemed less important than the other problems. He hadn't even done any sort of investigating to determine whether it might be something serious masquerading as a trivial annoyance.

Carl had always had some pride in his work achievements. He was somewhat well-known in the tech industry as a top systems administration guy, and he'd left a trail of competently-run systems behind him as he continued his career's upwards trajectory.

He was a Director now.

Did he really deserve that title though? After making such a critical bungle, could he really even be proud of what he'd done? Setting aside the fact that he'd probably be fired, how awful would it be for everyone who loved New Era if the game got destroyed because he'd done his job poorly?

His own daughter, Bobby, played New Era with her friends and loved it. He imagined she'd be crushed if she found out that her own dad had done something that caused the game to founder.

Mina had played it too, though she seemed to be done with it now. He imagined she'd still look back on some parts of it fondly, and he also imagined she'd be disappointed to find out how incompetent he'd been.

And then there were his friends Ir'alith and Vol, who had both invested tons of time into the game in order to get high level and become famous, not to mention Tim, who played the game to some degree, at the least, even if he did go by a ridiculous name like Drake Storm. He imagined they'd all be pretty mad, and—

His company line rang, breaking him out of his thoughts, and he grimaced when he saw who it was.

"Hi, Gab," he said when he picked up.

"Carl, how's it going over there?" his boss asked.

He sighed. "Well, like you'd expect, I guess. How about you?"

"Really picked the wrong week to start," she said with a sardonic chuckle. "The office is more than a little crazed today. I've been up on the top floor with Massey and the rest for the past couple hours. Harding's even kept calling in from the partner org in Tokyo where he's biztripping—he's been on the line with us since like five in the morning his time—and it's been tense to say the least."

"Wow," Carl said, trying to inject some sort of emotion into his voice that wasn't the near-crippling disappointment in himself that he was feeling at the moment.

"Yeah," she continued. "We dodged the bullet this time, but there's no chances being taken. Massey's throwing around numbers like I've never seen to get people contracted to unfuck everything ASAP, and I'm just trying to get through to some of my old SecOps contacts to see who we'd even get for an incident of this magnitude. I've never heard of something like this happening, so it's kind of sort of a dance to explain without explaining, if you know what I mean."

Carl tried, but he failed to prevent another deep sigh from escaping his mouth. The extent of his monumental screwup was overwhelming.

"Anyway," Gab continued, "if you have any names you want to throw in for that, shoot me a mail, but I just wanted to touch base and make sure you were doing okay before I get back to the crisis council. You sounded like you were taking it really hard last time we talked."

Carl blinked at her apparent sign-off. "Huh?" he said. "Er, you mean… I'm not getting fired over this?"

"No, Carl, you're not getting fired," Gab said firmly. "Being blunt, Massey actually said he feels awful about the whole thing when I drilled down into exactly how and why this happened. He said he was planning to give you a call later today once things got more settled, but, as a quick preview of what I expect he'll tell you, he's unfreezing and uncapping our budget, effective immediately.

"After the Gary episode, everyone at the company was in panic mode over what could happen if IT had too many resources, but now they've seen what happens when we're understaffed and overworked. I'll be looking to hire a Director of Information Security and staff an infosec department to take that load off you—though I'll be wanting your input during the hiring process there to avoid friction—and your department's open headcount is going from one to thirty two."

Carl took a long blink. "Uh, sorry, I think I misheard you."

"Thirty two," she repeated, "including some DBAs." She let out a small sigh. "Carl, you're the department head, but on average you close more tickets per week than anyone else in the department. Your IT team on average logs sixty percent more active hours than Engineering, who are already averaging over fifty hours a week. How you've managed to keep morale so high and prevent everyone on your team from burning out and quitting is… It makes no sense. I don't know how you've been doing it, but we can't be running things like that long-term. It's just not healthy."

"Uh…" Carl listened to her talk, but the words were sort of not making the kind of sense he was expecting. "Well, everyone pitches in some hours from home now and then," he said absently.

"We'll talk about this more tomorrow," Gab said, sounding distracted. "Are you working from home again?"

"I was planning to come in?" he said as his brain worked sluggishly to process the idea that he'd have to hire so many more people, wondering how much time it would take and how he could possibly fit it into his schedule.

"Good, I'll send you a calendar invite," she said. "Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Real quick before I go, I checked your PTO balance, and you haven't taken a day off all year. I want you to schedule four weeks of vacation over the next four months. If those weeks aren't in the system by the time perf evals roll around at the end of this month—because it's November already, somehow—I'm withholding your bonus and giving you a Does Not Meet Expectations in every category."

"Er… What?" Carl was unable to keep up with the things that were happening to him.

"Thirty two hires, four weeks of vacation," Gab said. "If it's not related to hiring, I don't want you doing any more work today. We'll talk more at the office tomorrow."

The call ended, and Carl sat back in his chair with a frown.

So…

He wasn't fired…

And he was getting enough budget to quintuple the size of his team…

And they were also going to hire a full infosec department to handle security-specific stuff now so he didn't have to worry about it…

And he had to take…

He had to take vacation?

Carl scratched his beard.

But what would he even do at the company if he didn't have to actively manage the overflow tickets that his team couldn't get to along with performing security audits and implementing policies to that end, not to mention hiring one person a year, and then dealing with Greg's continued calls for helpdesk support, and administrating the databases that Data Management wasn't covering, along with scouting and provisioning new hardware for the office, and attending external conferences, and going to meetings, and dealing with the continued embarrassment that was the repeating Accounting / Porn debacle?

He'd just be…

Like…

Managing?

As a Director of IT?

He didn't understand the concept.

He'd worked at a number of companies by now, and at no point had there ever been a Director of IT who just sat around and managed. It was one of the key characteristics of an IT department to be understaffed relative to the amount of work they had to deal with, and it was one of the job requirements for a Director of IT to be able to dive into the trenches with his—not that only men could be Directors of IT, of course, but he was referring to his own experience in that role here and used the pronoun that he referred to himself by—team and set an example.

He'd probably just misheard that part somehow.

Yup, it was the only explanation.

He was sure that Gab would clear things up tomorrow during their…eleven o'clock meeting, he decided as he accepted the calendar invite he'd just received.