He sat cold and alone in the industrial district; the heavy rain pouring all over his sleek black windbreaker. He had to make the call it was her or work and both had been taking a substantial amount of his time, he finished his cigarette and tossed the remains in a tray. Still undecided Cypher began the trek back to his desk; slowly removing his hood as he took refuge inside. the screens flashed a pallete of reds and oranges and yellows and greens, a trained eye required to decipher their meaning. From the labrynth of system metrics and logs he had noticed something odd. "Why would a service account be using a shell, or sudo for that matter?" an incident was raised immediately, all hands on deck. It would be another 3 sleepless nights followed by 2 more while the post mortem was written and the holes get patched.
She was right, this job was going to kill him.
He immediately began to do analysis and investigate the chain of network connections and logs that led to the event he just found. Of course he was right again, struts needed to be updated, dev was too busy "working on features" to port and the idea of a QA dept was more an innocent joke than reality. He had mentioned this in the last several meetings and considering the impossible "why are you hitting yourself" KPIs he was handed: his earlier quandry would likely be decided for him.
1 Week Later...
I was called into Larrys office, larry was my MBA supervisor. Friend of the CEO who needed a gig and got a job doing "busywork to keep auditors happy" I knew what this was gonna be, I saw 2 silohettes in the frosted glass and the second one was a dead ringer for one of the very few women in the office who wasn't elderly. Sasha was the lady from HR with the teriffic smile so you didn't feel as bad going home and telling your family that you weren't sure how you would be eating next week. Of course I'm not the target audience for this tactic and it goes as well as you'd expect.
As I enter, Larry instructs me to take a seat promptly but in an awkwardly polite way. Sasha smiles at me and asks how my morning is going.
"It's been great!" I continued "I saw my 3 kids off to school and helped my wife change a diaper" (I was smoking pot and watching cartoons in my pajamas) I finished with a final anecdote "and then on my way in I stopped by my favorite coffee shop and tipped my barista a little extra because she recently told me shes been struggling with some student loan debt." (I fistbumped the cashieer at the gas station I get my can of body destroying energy ooze from every morning)
All of this to cause as much emotional trauma on the other side of the table as possible, if I go down why not make it nuclear?
"W-well Jason, the reason we called you in here today is to talk about your performance. Y-you see th-"
Larry had to cut her off.
"Listen man, you really should've caught that breach before it happened, this is the 3rd one we've had this month. I know you're one person and we have 200k assets, but thats no excuse..."
"I totally understand, I'm sure my family will too..." I replied faking a somber look, it was a lie but I just want this to be over with.
"We're gonna have to let you go" larry said rather bluntly
"Your severence information will be delivered to you by both physical and email." Sasha added
A few more words were exchanged and I went to clean out my desk. Fast-Forward 2 hours and im 3 cans deep into a binge on cheap beer and a few grams of weed.
"Well, she got what she wanted" I thought to myself. Then I saw a text on my phone:
"We need to talk"
"2 for 2 today" I said to myself sarcastically.
I walked over to my desktop and fired up a Parrot VM, I've had a day and something is begging to be destroyed over TCP tonight...