what the hell just happened?

there was a tool whose whole job was to answer one question, wthjh, this is me running it on my own life.

0x00 static

somewhere there was a tool whose whole job was to answer one question.

it was called "wthjh", or what the hell just happened?

when a room full of servers went dark you opened it and it told you three things. what went out. where. and the most likely reason why. not the reason. the most likely one. it was the only thing in that whole building honest enough to admit it was guessing.

i spent years asking that question about infrastructure.

this is me asking it about everything else.

querying...
querying...
scope: too large
narrow your search

i can't narrow it. that's the problem. every time i try to say what happened it gets bigger. it isn't one layoff or one rejection or one house or one name in my messages i can't scroll past. it's weather. a pressure front the size of a country, and i'm one small point of light inside it, and so are you, probably, if you're reading this.

so i'm not telling it in order. order is for people who already know how it ends.

i'm telling it the way it feels. which is all at once.

0x01 4:47

4:47 am. i'm on pto. the suitcase is packed by the door. we're flying to vancouver in a few hours. for once the building can hold itself up without me.

a hand on my shoulder. shaking me. my ex, phone in her hand, her face doing something i'd never seen it do.

"check your work laptop."

i don't understand. i'm on pto. i say that out loud, like it's a password. like it'll protect me.

"just check it."

the laptop's in the bag by the suitcase. i open it on the bed in the dark. the screen is the only light in the room.

We have some difficult news to share.

i think it's a glitch. i think it's phishing. i think, i should report this. that's how good i am at my job. my first instinct when they erase me is to file a ticket about it.

4:47. the laptop. the bed. the suitcase by the door.

We no longer have a job for you at Google.

vpn. phone app. ping a coworker. nothing comes back. are they gone, or am i?

she's sitting next to me reading the news off her phone. thousands. tens of thousands. she reads the number out loud and i hear it like it's a weather report for somewhere else.

4:47 laptop disabled phone disabled badge disabled calendar gone chat gone the boarding pass still in my email the doc i was writing yesterday gone the code i wrote is still running somewhere right now, executing, serving, alive, and i'm not allowed to look at it, it's mine and it isn't, i'm employed on paper for a while, i'm paid for a while, i'm a ghost with direct deposit and a window seat.

447laptopdisableddisableddisabledvancouverareyougoneorarethey

we went anyway. what else do you do. the flight was already paid for.

i remember the mountains. i remember the water. i remember refreshing a dead inbox in her apartment bathroom so she wouldn't see me do it. i remember thinking i was on vacation from a job i didn't have.

thousands of people woke up to that screen. i was one of them. i just happened to have a suitcase packed.

0x02 the box

i'm going to tell you where i come from, but the file is corrupted. bear with me.

a small place. the ozarks. a kid who never quite fit anywhere. a dad who

[segment missing]

left. just left. a house where people i loved were losing fights with drug addiction and neglect. you learn to read weather young in a house like that. which silences mean calm and which ones mean hide.

the only thing that never changed its weather on me was the computer. break it. fix it. break it again. a machine doesn't leave. when a machine fails there's a reason, and if you're stubborn enough you find it, and i was the most stubborn thing for a hundred miles.

and then somebody noticed.

not telling you who. they looked at this strange obsessed kid and instead of saying "that's nice" they found a pile of old enterprise hardware. real servers. the kind that's supposed to live in a data center. they put it in a box, put a label on the box, and sent it to me.

to me.

i ran it in my bedroom. it sounded like a jet engine. the room was unbearable in summer. i didn't care. i lay on the floor next to it at night and listened to the fans and i'd never heard anything that sounded so much like being taken seriously.

thank you for that box.

0x03 liturgy

they found me. i didn't go looking. somebody found the kid with the box and cold called.

and i went in, into one of those gray concrete buildings past the edge of everything, no windows, and for once, i was home.

blessed are the machines i brought up with these hands. hundreds. then more than a thousand.

blessed is the firmware, validated.

blessed is the crash at 3am and the dump that told me its secrets if i sat with it long enough.

blessed is the cold aisle. the only place the temperature was ever exactly right.

blessed is the light inside the glass, carrying your photos and your searches and the questions you'd never ask a person.

blessed is the incident. blessed is the postmortem and its blameless prayer: we do not ask who did this, we ask how the system let it happen.

blessed is the badge. blessed is the door. blessed is the free lunch and the all-hands where they told us we were family, blessed is the family, blessed is the stock, blessed is the vesting schedule, blessed is the rating, blessed is the ladder, blessed is the next rung and the next and the next and

blessed is the cloud, the real one, steel and copper and diesel and kids who weren't supposed to be there, blessed is the sky i held up, blessed is me, blessed, i made it, i made it, i'm inside, i'm

We want you to know that we recognize how difficult this is and we appreciate all you’ve contributed to Google.

nobody tells you the church can excommunicate you by an email.

0x04 register

ka-ching.

good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining the call.

ka-ching.

we had a strong quarter. we remain disciplined. we are leaning into efficiency. we are right-sizing. we are flattening layers. we are aligning our cost structure with our long-term priorities.

ka-ching.

the board recognized strong performance with a new equity award. a number with eight zeros on the end. plus a few million for private security, because somebody has to keep the weather off him.

a month later we say goodbye to thousands of colleagues. we take full responsibility. a few months after that we spend tens of billions buying back our own stock. we take full responsibility for that too.

across town another company announced its own year of efficiency and its own buyback the same afternoon, and its stock jumped before dinner. now that's a groove.

ka-ching. ka-ching.

money isn't a thing, you see. it's weather we get to control. open the throttle, it rains up. cut headcount, it rains up. it only ever rains down on other people.

the cash register is the sound of the layoff.

we remain disciplined.

every ka-ching is a badge going dead.

we are leaning into efficiency.

every coin that drops is somebody's rent.

shareholder value.

a house. a relationship. a friend.

shareholder value.

you can dance to it. that's the worst part. some nights i catch myself nodding along, thinking if i just ground harder, got a little more of that cash, i'd end up on the right side of the register.

now you're getting it.

ka-ching.

ka-

0x05 forecast

good evening, and here's your forecast!

after about a year of steady rejection across the region, we're finally seeing some clearing. a local engineer has been hired by another enormous company, Meta! highs in the mid-optimism, with a light breeze of "lightning doesn't strike twice."

you may notice some lingering fog from last year, when they cut tens of thousands of people and called it efficiency. but don't worry. markets responded with sunshine!

looking ahead, our local engineer is fixing hundreds of broken servers. conditions are excellent!

and folks, look at this. a high-pressure system moving in: they've bought a house! with someone they love! a yard! a future! clear skies as far as the eye can see!

into the new year the company cuts another few percent and calls them low performers. our engineer survives! let us give them a hand.

now we're tracking a, uh, a new system. their whole team is being told they can relocate across the country or take a check and go.

they have a house. they have a person in the house.

they take the check.

and then the, uh. the person leaves. that's a front moving through. very cold. very sudden. and then the, the house.

the house goes too.

so what we're looking at, um, is they chose the house over the job, and now they have neither, and i don't. i don't have a graphic for that.

they're in a chicago apartment now. paycheck to paycheck. putting groceries back at the register sometimes. highs in the.

highs in the.

there's no little cloud icon for losing the person you built a home with while the money disappears and the future evaporates and you start waking up every day feeling like a failure, knowing it's your fault and your fault only. there's no icon for the day you hand back the keys.

i did everything right. i took the safer road. i chose the shelter.

the storm took the shelter anyway.

0x06 overclock

WARNING: core voltage outside safe range
WARNING: thermal limit exceeded
continue anyway? [Y/n] Y

i'm going to tell you about this part because if i leave it out, the rest of this is a lie by omission, and i don't want to do that.

after the house, after the person, after the check ran out, there was white lines knocking at my door and i let it in.

you have to understand what it felt like at first, or you won't understand why anyone does it. it felt like the light in my life came back. like someone flipped the generators on early. everything that had gone dark lit up at once. i could talk. i could work. i could stand in a room and not feel like i don't belong. i felt confident. i felt like my old self.

that's the trick. it doesn't feel like falling. it feels like overclocking in a way. you push the core past its rating and for a while it benchmarks beautifully. faster than it ever ran stock. you look at the numbers and think, god damn, why didn't i do this sooner?

nobody watches the thermals during the benchmark.

[ 3:12:04] cpu0: temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled
[ 3:12:04] cpu0: temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled
[ 3:12:05] cpu0: temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled

then the 4am comedowns. the clock in my head stuck at 4:47 again, except now i'd done it to myself. the jaw. the heart racing and racing and racing. being up for three days straight. the money i didn't have, going somewhere i couldn't put on any spreadsheet. the texts sent at hours no one should be awake. the mornings of doing the math on what i'd spent and doing it again hoping the number changed.

it never changed.

here's the thing they don't tell you about running hot: the silicon doesn't fail all at once. it degrades. a little damage every cycle, invisible, cumulative, until one day the chip just won't hold a clock it used to hold easily. i felt that happening to me. to my patience, my memory, the people who still picked up the phone, which most of i no longer have.

i'm not going to give you a redemption story. there wasn't one. there was a night i looked at myself in a mirror at my current apartment and didn't recognize what was looking back, and i was too tired to keep lying to myself.

so i'm trying to stop.

not cleanly. not gracefully. a lot of nights i'm wanting it so bad my hands shake. but i've been lowering my usage on and off, so that's something.

0x07 ambiguity

there was a job with my name on it at Google, again. i'd done that exact work, for that exact kind of building, for years. they wanted me. me specifically.

so i bet everything. packed my life into a car and moved to a town where i didn't know a single person.

i passed every technical interview. every one.

then the manager who wanted me left for elon's rocket company.

my candidacy got handed to someone new, like a ticket in someone else's queue. they wanted a coffee chat. casual. not an interview. just a chat.