The Intern Infestation: Or, Why I Need a Bigger Mute Button for Real Life
The annual migration has begun. Not the wildebeest, not the swallows returning to Capistrano, but something far more disruptive to the delicate ecosystem of my cloud kingdom: the summer interns. Freshly scrubbed, armed with IDEs they barely understand and a truly breathtaking lack of awareness, they descend upon the ticketing system like a denial-of-service attack powered by sheer cluelessness.
Yesterday, one of these “bright young minds” – let’s call him Chad, because they’re always a Chad or a Brad – pinged me on every single comms channel simultaneously. The world, according to his frantic messages, was ending. His critical application, which I can only assume was a “Hello World” tutorial he’d creatively broken, couldn’t “see the database.”
“Which database?” I grunted into the headset, already picturing the tangled mess of security groups and IAM permissions this future captain of industry had undoubtedly vomited into existence.
“The… uh… the main one? The RDS thingy?”
Groundbreaking diagnostic work, Chad. Turns out, after he’d “just tried a few things” (words that send shivers down any sane operator’s spine), he’d managed to delete the outbound rule in his EC2 instance’s security group that allowed it to talk to the RDS instance. He’d also, for reasons that probably involve a dartboard and a list of AWS services, tried to point his application directly at an S3 bucket endpoint, hoping it would magically transform CSVs into a relational database.
“Did you consult the meticulously crafted onboarding documentation I was forced to write by some paper-pusher in HR who thinks ‘synergy’ is a technical term?” I asked, already knowing the answer. The silence on the other end was palpable, thick with the dawning horror of someone realizing they might actually have to read something.
“There’s documentation?”
I fixed it, of course. A few clicks in the VPC console, a curt explanation that would sail miles over his head about how security groups aren’t just suggestions, and a strong recommendation that he stick to the pre-configured Cloud9 environment. Naturally, I didn’t explain how I knew what he’d done. Let him think CloudTrail is some dark magic I invoke, or that I have micro-drones monitoring his every misguided click. The less these users understand about the elegant, Goldberg-esque contraptions I’ve built, the safer my job and my sanity.
Another one, bless her cotton socks, couldn’t understand why her Lambda function, designed to “optimize image uploads” (read: probably just recompress JPEGs into oblivion), kept timing out. She’d given it 128MB of memory and expected it to process gigapixel TIFFs sourced directly from S3, all while complaining that “the cloud is supposed to be infinitely scalable.” Yes, love, and my patience is supposed to be infinite, yet here we are, both facing disappointment. I pointed her to the memory settings and the concept of “not trying to boil the ocean with a teaspoon,” then billed three hours of “Advanced Serverless Architectural Consultation” to her department’s cost center. Cost efficiencies, as per my job description. My efficiency, their cost.
They ask about “tape backups.” I just stare at them until they shuffle away, defeated. I tell them we use “S3 Glacier Deep Archive protected by a bespoke quantum entanglement matrix.” They usually nod sagely and never ask again.
The best part of this charade? Management thinks I’m “mentoring.” They see closed tickets. They see systems miraculously healing themselves after user-inflicted plagues. They don’t see the caffeine, the contempt, or the carefully constructed IAM policies that ensure these fledgling disasters can’t actually delete anything that matters. Or at least, anything I can’t restore from a snapshot before my first coffee break.
Just another day in the cloud, proving my superiority one PEBCAK error at a time. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a “critical” alert that someone’s trying to attach an EBS volume to a Lambda function. This is going to be good.