'Twas the Night Before Shutdown

‘Twas the night before shutdown and all through the Hat not an email was sending – not even a chat; the commits were hung in their PRs with care, in the hopes that reviewers soon would be there.

The developers were nestled all snug in their chairs, while visions of green-checks danced under their hairs. Some in their editors, I in my shell, had just settled down to write a festive farewell.

When out on the server arose such a warning, turns out someone missed it from early this morning; colon-double-u-q and I flew to the logs, used all my wrenches, adjusted the cogs.

Runtimes on the breast of the restarted container gave a lustre of hope that things might get saner; when what to my bleary eyes should outcrop, but a miniature leak right there in top.

With a little old program, compiled in C, I knew in a moment that it MUST be leak-free; more rapid than Python its memory claimed, as it malloced and freed, as was its domain.

“Now, ps! Now, netcat! Now, vim and uptime! On, gdb! On, tree and df and find! To the top of the nice list! To the top of the heap! Now SIGKILL away so I might get some sleep!”

As stale processes that before the memleak would fly, when met with an admin, shutdown and… live; so up to the repo the --forcers they flew, with packets of hope that it might soon be through.

And then, in a twinkling, I saw on my screen the booing and cawing of each little fiend. As I typed in my command on SO I just found, down my machine crashed, stuck on a sound.

I was dressed in pajamas, from my foot to my head, so when I jumped up, I slipped lacking tread. Like a bundle of bricks, I fell on my neck. I went to the mirror, just so I could check.

My eyes how they spun! My nose, how dreadful! My cheeks like molasses, my hair quite bedful. My dull little mouth drawn down like an arch, the beard on my chin not trimmed since last March.

The stress of the year I held tight in my teeth, the knot in my stomach circled my gut like a wreath. I had a solemn face and quite a round belly, that shook when I sighed like a bowlful of jelly.

I was chubby and plump, a right miserable old elf, but I laughed when I saw what had become of myself. A look in my eye and a twist of the head, soon gave me to know I had given to dread.

I spoke not a word, but went straight back to work, and closed all the tickets opened by some dumb jerk. Somewhere along, I lost sight of my best, gave into pressures and held onto stress.

I looked at the time, it was past December; what happened before, I couldn’t remember. but when I saw my team had come through, it rekindled why this is what I chose what to do.

The past couple years especially have been rough on all of us and it’s so easy to let stress get to you. When things already feel like they’re piled up so high, even small things start to feel like mountains. It’s a gradual process that can turn us into people we don’t like.

So of course remember to be kind to others, but especially yourself. Work will be there when you get back. So will the news.