Another Day, Another Digitally Challenged Lifeform Stumbling into My AetherGrid It was a Tuesday. Or maybe a Wednesday. Honestly, the days blur into a monotonous cycle of deploying YAML manifests that are clearly too advanced for this organization and sipping lukewarm coffee, the only constant in a universe of ephemeral cloud instances. I was elbow-deep in optimizing our geo-redundant, hyper-converged, serverless-but-not-really AetherGrid ingress routing – you know, actual work that keeps the lights on and the data flowing, unlike some people’s contributions – when the little notification popped up.
Luser: “Hi, I’m new. I need access to the cloud thingy?”
The “cloud thingy.” Right. My meticulously architected, globally distributed, multi-petabyte AetherGrid, the backbone of this entire circus, reduced to “the cloud thingy.” I could already feel my brain cells committing ritual suicide.
Me: “Welcome. To which specific service tier of the AetherGrid do you require provisional access, and have you completed the prerequisite ‘Digital Sentience & Basic Acronym Comprehension’ module on the HR portal? Your cost center approver will also need to countersign Form 34-Delta-Prime, assuming your use case aligns with the Q3 resource allocation directives.”
Silence. Beautiful, contemplative silence. I imagined the frantic clicking on the other end, the dawning horror as they realized that asking for help from me was not going to be a casual, hand-holding exercise. This isn’t some consumer-grade “click here for cloud” nonsense. This is the AetherGrid. It demands respect. And a correctly filled-out form. In triplicate. Uploaded to the designated S3 bucket with the correct metadata tags, naturally.
Luser: “Uhhh. My manager just said to ask you to get me on the platform?”
Deep breath. Count to ten. Imagine them trying to configure a VPC security group. The image is both terrifying and slightly amusing.
Me: “Right. ‘The platform.’ Of course. Let’s start with the basics. Do you have an approved ‘Intent to Compute’ requisition? It’s a prerequisite for the ‘Request for Credentials’ workflow, which itself is gated by the ‘Acceptable Use Policy Acknowledgment’ smart contract. You’ll find the links on the intranet, assuming you can navigate past the animated GIF of our CEO playing golf.”
I may have embellished that last part about the GIF. Or maybe I didn’t. The point is, there are processes. Processes I may or may not have personally designed to be just opaque enough to deter the unworthy.
Luser: “I… I don’t know what any of that means. Can’t you just add me?”
“Just add me.” The three words that curdle my coffee faster than a kernel panic. As if I’m some digital doorman handing out keys to the kingdom. This isn’t about adding. This is about ensuring the continued sanctity and operational integrity of systems that people like this are constitutionally incapable of understanding, let alone using responsibly.
Me: “Access to AetherGrid resources is provisioned based on role-based access control (RBAC) policies, authenticated via our centralized IAM provider, and logged for audit purposes in immutable storage – think Glacier, but with more contempt for your recovery time objectives. ‘Just adding you’ would bypass approximately seventeen layers of carefully constructed security and compliance. We wouldn’t want that, would we?”
More silence. I could almost hear the gears grinding, smoke probably billowing from their ears.
Luser: “Okay, um. Where do I find the… first form you mentioned?”
Progress! Of a sort. I sent them a link. To a wiki page. That links to another wiki page. Which contains an outdated link to a SharePoint document that might have the correct form name, if they can decipher the revision history.
My work here was done. For now. They’d either figure it out, thereby proving a marginal level of competence, or they’d scurry back to their manager, hopefully with a newfound appreciation for the complexities they so blithely dismiss.
Another user “helped.” Another day I question my life choices, and then remember that if it weren’t for these clueless meat-based interrupts, I wouldn’t get to feel so damn superior. Now, back to those ingress controllers. They’re not going to optimize themselves.