The desks cold and empty, alone in the gloom,
The team were all home, on a well-deserved break,
Recalling true meanings of ‘cookies’ and ‘cake’
The roadmap was groomed for the year ahead,
The flatscreens were dark, the keyboards were quiet,
And nothing was failing except for my diet,
I opened up Slack, to see who was online,
I told them I wouldn’t be working today...
But I’ll just check it once, and then put it away,
Six hundred and five unread notifications,
From @logentries , @newrelic , @rollbar and Chrome,
And a few from my boss, who was also at home.
I picked up the wine and I headed upstairs,
I switched on the laptop, I plugged in the screen,
And ssh’ed into my virtual machine,
But I couldn’t see any cause for alarm.
And that’s when I felt it, a tickle, a scratch,
A weird deja vu that I couldn’t despatch.
And decrypted the database connection string,
I clicked on ‘connect’ as suspicion was dawning,
And there, clear as day - a certificate warning.
But the SSL cert expired on Christmas Day,
I remember they mentioned that when I first started,
But the person who told me had long since departed.
I renewed the cert, and got back to the boozing.
But I couldn’t renew it for three months, or one...
It’s one year, or two years, or five years - what fun!
I sent the obligatory All Staff email,
And I wondered if anyone here would remember,
To follow it up at the start of December...
And thanks to our new infosec supervisor,
The server certificate’s all up to date,
The platform is stable, and everything’s great
To maintain my good reason to sneak off upstairs.
They all think I’m fixing a broken website...
Merry Christmas to all! Now, who’s up for Fortnite?