Federal IT 4: Incidentious — Return from the Grave

◆   ◆   ◆

PROLOGUE — FOUR HOURS OF SLEEP AND A BAD FEELING

Batdork woke before the sun with roughly four hours of sleep and the kind of emotional hangover no amount of coffee could properly patch. The argument from the day before had technically ended, but the body keeps its own ticket queue. Some incidents remain open even after everybody stops typing.

At 5:03 in the morning, he sat outside the apartment in the car, staring at the short drive to LA Fitness like it was a deployment route. Pinky was still somewhere on the other side of the world, grocery shopping, talking to him, wearing pants, existing in that strange quiet space after conflict where nothing is solved but nothing is exploding either.

He did not try to decode it. Not today. Today had enough systems to troubleshoot.

He drove to the gym.

THUNK.

Car door closed. Mission started.

Batdork did what Batdork does when the mind is heavy: he moved weight with controlled form, refused to ego-lift, and let the body do something measurable while the rest of life remained stubbornly abstract. When he finished, the familiar gym woman happened to come out at nearly the same time. Nothing happened. No cinematic embrace. No secret message from the universe. Just two people leaving a gym.

Which, for Batdork, was suspiciously normal.

◆   ◆   ◆

ACT I — DAMN-IT TOWER

At 9:01 a.m., Batdork entered the federal office and discovered that his government laptop had apparently spent the entire weekend resting so it could begin updating the moment he needed to work.

Of course.

The machine had forty-eight hours of peace, darkness, taxpayer-supported electricity, and absolutely nothing expected of it. Monday morning arrived and the laptop stretched digitally, yawned, and decided it was finally time to better itself.

UPDATING...

ServiceNow loaded at the speed of continental drift. Commissioner Peter appeared in Teams, briefly away, then green. Somewhere in the building, the PIV Signal had effectively turned on.

Batdork stared at the screen.

Please do not give me a reason to take sick leave before noon.

Then the tickets began.

INCIDENT ONE — THE FALSE DEATH

The first laptop case had already looked dramatic enough: a machine suddenly shutting down and convincing its owner that something terrible had happened. Batdork investigated.

Cause of death: none.

Cause of panic: Windows Update.

REBOOT.

The patient lived. Incident closed.

INCIDENT TWO — THE ART MUSEUM

The second machine had achieved a more advanced state of failure. It was no longer a useful laptop. It had become an object that looked like a laptop. Functional purpose had been replaced by aesthetic presence.

Congratulations. You are now part of an art museum.

Batdork pronounced it dead and requested a replacement. Naturally, the death generated another request because in Federal IT one deceased laptop can produce paperwork offspring before the replacement laptop itself is even born.

Incident closed. RITM created. Depot notified. Bureaucracy satisfied.

◆   ◆   ◆

ACT II — THE OPERATING ROOM

By late morning, Batdork had a replacement laptop to deploy. The conference room was unavailable because the building administrators had claimed it for a meeting. The official operating theater was occupied.

So Batdork found an abandoned cubicle.

Not a laboratory. Not a clean room. Not even a proper conference table. An abandoned cube in the federal wilderness.

Good enough. We are delivering a laptop.

The replacement machine entered the world wrapped in cardboard, foam, plastic, policy, and the crushing expectations of enterprise computing.

RIIIIIP.

Packaging opened.

CLICK.

Power connected.

WHIRRRRRR...

The newborn booted.

There was one complication. The administrator password needed to be reset. No birth is entirely without drama.

Batdork performed the necessary procedure, completed deployment, confirmed the machine could function, and discovered that this child had arrived preloaded with SEE.

Vaccinated at birth.

Forty minutes after entering the operating room, the first delivery was complete.

Mother and laptop were stable.

Batdork washed his metaphorical hands and returned to the tower.

◆   ◆   ◆

THE SECOND BIRTH — REMOTE CHILD LABOR

Another replacement had already been delivered directly to a remote user. Earlier, the user had received the machine and then seemingly vanished into vacation gravity. The ticket sat there like an expectant parent whose scheduled delivery date had been replaced by the words: went to the beach.

Eventually the user returned.

Batdork conducted the second deployment remotely. Another machine woke. Another user logged in. Another digital child entered the federal ecosystem.

BEEP.

But this newborn still needed an IDRS Terminal ID.

Vaccination required. Separate RITM.

Because apparently laptop pediatrics requires paperwork too.

◆   ◆   ◆

ACT III — SOMETHING BEEPED

Around the same time, another ticket waited in the shadows.

A laptop was making noises.

Not crashing. Not smoking. Not displaying a blue screen of death. Making an audible sound when the user was not actively doing anything.

BEEP.

The user had heard it before. A coworker had already updated drivers. Enterprise software had recently changed. There were perfectly reasonable explanations.

Batdork knew this.

Unfortunately, the story did not care.

BEEP.

The machine sat there powered on, connected, technically alive, behaving like something inside it wanted attention.

Batdork looked at the ticket and remembered the machines he had already pronounced dead. He remembered the replacements arriving. New laptops opening their screens for the first time while old ones waited for pickup, retirement, depot, or oblivion.

And then a thought entered the Federal IT mythology.

What if they know they are being replaced?

It was ridiculous.

It was also exactly the kind of ridiculous thought that made the day start resembling a horror movie.

The haunted laptop was eventually reassigned because the user wanted service closer to home. Batdork did not have to exorcise it.

For the moment.

◆   ◆   ◆

THE RETURN FROM THE GRAVE

The deeper joke had already been forming across the Federal IT journals: Batdork pronounces laptops dead before the laptops agree with the diagnosis.

Some machines fail completely. Others limp along. Some accept retirement. Some refuse enterprise policy. Some spend hours in digital purgatory and then suddenly begin working again as if death had merely been a suggestion.

The replacements were being born because old laptops had died.

And now the old technology seemed unwilling to leave quietly.

Every time we bring one into the world... another refuses to leave it.

That was the connective tissue Batdork had been missing.

Federal IT was no longer a help desk.

It was a life-and-death ward.

Incident tickets became death certificates. RITMs became requests for reincarnation. Asset tags became birth certificates. Terminal IDs became vaccination records. ServiceNow became the government registry recording which machines had lived, died, returned, been reassigned, or simply wandered away to the beach.

And Batdork somehow held several jobs at once.

Coroner of the old.

Doctor of the new.

Exorcist of whatever refused to stay dead.

◆   ◆   ◆

INTERMISSION — THE VINTAGE BATCOSTUME

At some point, biology submitted its own priority-one ticket.

Batdork went to the bathroom.

This should have been simple.

It was not.

The night before, laundry had not been completed. Batdork had improvised that morning with older underwear. This particular piece of legacy equipment came from an era before tactical access architecture had apparently been standardized.

There was no pee hole.

Alfredo... the suit has no tactical access panel.

It was the underwear equivalent of Batman returning to the blue-and-gray costume from some forgotten era before anybody at Wayne Enterprises had considered emergency bathroom access.

Batdork stood in a federal restroom fighting his own clothing like a superhero whose greatest enemy had turned out to be elastic.

TUG.

YANK.

CLANK!

The Batcostume was eventually defeated.

Incident resolved.

Root cause: laundry negligence combined with obsolete underwear architecture.

Corrective action: survive until evening.

◆   ◆   ◆

ACT IV — NO DOMAIN FOUND

Shortly before two in the afternoon, Batdork remembered that another user was supposed to arrive with a VPN problem.

He had already survived two laptop births, multiple death certificates, a haunted beeping machine, ServiceEventually, and a bathroom equipment failure.

He needed lunch.

Eat before the next patient arrives.

Then the user came in.

An older woman carried her government laptop into DAMN-IT Tower because the machine could not find the domain.

NO DOMAIN FOUND.

The words looked appropriately supernatural.

The laptop was alive. Windows worked. The hardware had a pulse. But when the user tried to connect the way she had always connected, the machine could no longer find its way home.

Batdork had a suspicion.

He looked at the VPN software.

Cisco AnyConnect.

The old doorway.

The agency had moved away from it. The user was still trying to enter through the previous interface, but the configuration she knew was no longer the path the laptop was supposed to use. The machine now belonged to a different VPN environment.

The problem was not that the laptop had lost its soul.

The user was knocking on a door that had been retired.

You are trying to enter through the ghost of the old VPN.

Batdork opened the new enterprise VPN interface instead.

CLICK.

Credentials entered.

WHIRRRR...

Connection negotiated.

CONNECTED.

The laptop found its domain.

The patient lived.

No exorcism required.

Just the correct portal.

◆   ◆   ◆

THE GHOSTS WERE OLD SYSTEMS

And that was when the horror joke became clearer.

Not every ghost in Federal IT is a dead laptop.

Sometimes the ghost is an old system that has been replaced but still exists just enough to confuse somebody.

Old software. Old instructions. Old habits. Old interfaces. A user remembers how the door used to open, but Enterprise quietly replaced the entire building while nobody was looking.

The new systems are born.

The old systems linger.

And somewhere between the two stands Batdork, holding a PIV card and trying to determine which piece of technology is alive, which one is dead, and which one simply has not gotten the fucking memo.

BEEP.

Batdork looked at the laptop.

Do not start that shit.

◆   ◆   ◆

FIRST-PERSON CUT — THE MAN UNDER THE COSTUME

The jokes worked again by the end of the workday, but they had not been available every minute.

I came into this morning tired in a way that sleep alone did not explain. Yesterday was still sitting somewhere behind my eyes. I did the gym. I went to work. I handled the tickets. I deployed the laptops. I made the jokes because the jokes make the chaos easier to carry. Sometimes that is what Batdork is for.

I am not actually a superhero. I am an ordinary guy who keeps getting extraordinary amounts of ordinary shit stacked on the same day.

But the machines still need to work. The users still need help. The tickets still need to close. So I keep moving.

Then, because the universe refuses to leave a dramatic statement alone, Batdork eventually left work and drove home.

◆   ◆   ◆

EPILOGUE — THE PARKING LOT

By evening, Batdork was back outside the apartment.

He did not immediately go inside.

The Federal IT shift had ended. The haunted laptop had gone elsewhere. The old VPN had been laid to rest. The newborn machines were alive. The user had found her domain.

For a few minutes, the parking lot became neutral territory.

No ServiceNow.

No RITM.

No Commissioner Peter.

No beeping laptop asking to be remembered.

Just Batdork in the car, looking toward the apartment and remembering one unfinished mission from the night before.

Laundry.

The same laundry whose absence had forced him into vintage underwear architecture that morning.

The final enemy was waiting upstairs.

Silent.

Unfolded.

Possibly judging him.

...

Batdork stared toward the building.

I fought the dead today. I delivered the newborn. I exorcised an obsolete VPN. And now I have to wash underwear.

The episode had not quite ended.

Because some villains do not beep.

Some villains sit in a laundry basket and wait.

◆   ◆   ◆

POST-CREDIT STATUS BOARD

Episode status: Not entirely closed. The laundry is still alive.

THE ROMNOTE PROJECT • WORDS. STORIES. LEGACY.