Terminal Side Effects
It Keebs Me Tame
Micah had serious anger management problems and an org-wide reputation for making keycaps fly. Fortunately, this hardly affected his productivity—he had a mason jar teeming with spare caps and hot-swappable switches that none dared "borrow" from. The Jar of Spares and the PCB board—which proved sturdier than his wife's phone after a heated argument—gave Micah a sustainable way of regulating his corporate outbursts without endangering the safety of his co-workers.
Terror-stricken Manager
Owen, Micah's manager, had just joined the company. Previously, he'd managed a few timid pushovers who wouldn't dare squeak under even the harshest of his "leadership" directives. Owen's first order of business was to straighten out the keyboard ordeal once and for all, but what a quasi-leader is to short-fused fist-slinging Micah is what God is to a non-believer.
"Better the keycaps than your fingers," was Owen's rude awakening as he realized that his days of ordering direct reports around were well in his rearview mirror.
The Inferior Superior Digital Nomad
It's been a month since Owen was last seen at the office. He has been working remotely—from Thailand—at a time that suspiciously coincided with Micah's annual appraisal. Micah was furious after learning that his fat bonus check was but a dream turned sour. Soon after learning that Owen had fled town, he was seen challenging the office guards to "come tame his tempers."
As for Owen, everyone totally believes that his interest in visiting the Wat Phra Dhammakaya temple was what brought him to Thailand.
A Spotted-Hyena In The Flow
Henry, on the other hand, is riddled with an entirely different beast: He'd smile and sometimes even laugh at the screen uncontrollably.
At first, I wrote it off as a chat conversation that he'd found funny--nothing weird about that, right? I guess. But as weeks passed, I shoulder-surfed his screen enough to ascertain that it was far from it--so off-base: It'd always happen when he looked at a terminal window split into four sections arranged in a 2x2 grid.
I'm So Plugged In
Intrigued by this work anomaly, I paid more attention to it and discovered a correlation for the ages: the more complex the problem he dissected, the funnier he found it.
The Cat's Out
When Henry received a high-severity incident, I knew I had struck the mother lode: the bottom of it was so close, I could almost touch it.
It all started with a smile as he read the incident title. The smile went from subtle to ear-to-ear as he made it to the description. Henry was already visually breaking the problem into isolated layers, forming attack lines for each. He started from the top, where the "fun" often begins, and by the time he made it to the Linux Kernel, he was already rolling on the ground laughing.