The Spider

I’m not sure what possessed me but right before my walk last Thursday, I flipped over my sneakers and shook them before putting them on.  To get some pebbles out.

I almost never do that. 

To my surprise– shake, shake, shake– out came a spider. 

Not a small one. 

Not Australia big.  But not a small one.

[I was *this* close to having superpowers.]

Funny thing… for the last seven days, I’ve been shaking every shoe before putting it on. 

Spider trauma.

I officially stopped the shaking this morning.

And it got me thinking.

Production outages are 100% like spiders in your shoes. You’ll keep shaking them for a week or two before you recover from the trauma.

The whole episode might be karma for me. Because whenever someone finds a spider at work, I like to grab some popcorn, lurk quietly on the triage bridge, and enjoy what I call “responsibility theater,” a variant of security theater.

Long calls with dozens of people.  Calming tones.  Every person who joins the bridge seems to know how to do one-and-only-one thing really well.  They do it.  If it helps, great.  “We guessed that was it all along!”  If not, they leave the bridge– more thankful than dejected–  and the call goes out for someone else.

Rinse.  Repeat.

There!  All mystery removed from production support calls.

–

The hard truth in all this?

Every engineer knows that there’ll be another spider.  That’s their nature…. spiders and engineers. And every technologist worth their salt knows that the next one will be a completely different spider… hiding anywhere but your shoes. So… shaking them for two weeks— and making a big public show of it—  is… just… comforting… to all the fine folks who don’t understand spiders… or engineering.

#TorturedAnalogies

#ThereReallyWasASpider

#StillALittleShook