Intro
This is an actual dream, or more like a nightamre, that I had recently. I guess it’s illustrative of an IT person’s worst fears.
The dream
Well I don’t remember dreams very well and I’m not the kind ot embellish stories to make them sound more interesting so this is going to be brief.
So in this dream I am at the office. My work situation seems to be that I have slightly more access than I need to various systems. The workpllace is a lagre corporate office where processes are followed but still individual contributors want to make a difference so there is some self-imposed pressure to do something of value.
So anyway I find myself in this dream needing to make a configuration change to a monitoring system. Something like a Zabbix implementation. Now I know that I am not chiefly responsible for it, and in fact I should not be modifying it, but I have some idea that what I plan to do will make it better in some way. It’s in fairly widespread usage – about 150 users.
While doing this improvement it asks me for a new administrator password. But it wasn’t exactly that. It changed the administrator password, displayed the new one, and suggested I copy it and save it, which I did. This dialog only displayed for about 10 seconds and that screen went away.
Actually I hadn’t quite had time to save that new admin password, I just had it in my clipboard. I went to notepad++ to paste it and preserve it. There was nothing in my clipboard! That deep, sinking feeling set in. Even if it continues to work, we won’t be able to do patches so it is as good as killed, it will just take a little longer.
I guess we’ve all been there, right?
Inspired by
IRL I was purchasing tickets for Shen Yun. I selected seats and was at the part where you enter credit card info. My Edge browser proposed to enter a generated credit card number, which I generally approve of as an anti-fraud measure, so I let it fill in the info. It needed biometric authentication – face. The next thing I knew the whole browser screen vanished. Edge running on a completely patched Windows 11 PC simply crashed without a word. I think it bears mentioning because unlike the bad old days where crashes were customary, these days it’s not such a quotidien occurence. And when I restarted things, there was no memory of my seat selection but they were blocked from being purchaseable. Kind of a worst case scenario there. I didn’t wish to wait for the 20 minute purchase timer to timeout as few seats were available. Fortunately there were comparable seats in another row. Second time through it did not propose to fill in with a random card and things went through.