’Twas the Fifth of July

’Twas the fifth of July
and all through the Bay
developers chilled,
enjoying their day

For after the 4th,
hungover and tired
tech leads and managers
together conspired

To rest and revive
and why should they not?
they’re on PTO —
but they all forgot

That interns, alas,
make hourly pay
and broke college students
don’t throw cash away

They arrived to the office
and what did they see?
not one senior dev
to greet their trainee

The fridge was stocked full
of untouched La Croix
the microwave empty
of meat made of soy

The foosball and ping pong
lay silent at rest
not one stander stood
at their standing up desk

A palpable silence
was hung in the air
no muttering curses,
no push-to-prod prayer

The interns they crept
through this ghost neighborhood
there was work to be done
and do it they would

One spritely gal
had PRs in review
With her mentor away,
A friend looked it through

“Seems good to me”
he shrugged with a nod
“Swag,” she replied,
and deployed it to prod

“Hey, what’s a merge conflict?”
asked one github guru
“Probably nothing,
just force push it through.”

Another young man
wrote some sql mislabeled
so he glanced around quick
and typed in “drop tables;”

A new Linux user
had a file to delete
oh, what was that line?
“rm -rf, that does it for me”

Together they hacked
productive and cheery
till the end of the day
then finally weary

They sorted their trash
and dimmed down their screens
and in logo-stamped backpacks
they stashed their machines

For they could not hear
that just across town
the pagers were screaming
as servers went down

Slowly but surely
the on-calls awoke
and suddenly yelped
as EVERYTHING BROKE

The slack was aflame!
nagios flashed!
in yellow, then red
as still more nodes crashed!

They hailed their ubers
and sped down the road
they grabbed motor scooters
how quickly they rode!

They burst through the doors
and rushed up the stairs
whipped out their machines
to start making repairs

Those poor SREs
stayed up through the night
and labored away
to make everything right

And when the next morning
those interns arrived
well rested and smiling
and feeling alive

Their managers grumbled
a tired “Hello
enjoy your day off
you’re on PTO.”