The Technician Has Left the Queue. The Queue Objects.
At an hour when sensible people were either asleep or making coffee with the solemnity of a medical procedure, the Sparkles website reached a milestone.
The difficult work was complete. The new site was coherent, responsive, searchable, visually polished, and ready to be handed to its owner. One outside service still had an unresolved support ticket, but the technician’s heavy lift was officially over.
A closing order was issued:
Ticket closed. Technician released into civilian life.
This was a beautiful idea. It survived for several minutes.
First came a harmless question: Would the remaining support reply arrive in the Sparkles email account?
The mailbox was opened.
It contained approximately 54,000 messages and occupied about 15 gigabytes.
The technician stared into the sedimentary layers of newsletters, notifications, forgotten promotions, ancient attachments, and email organisms that had apparently evolved without human supervision.
There was no support reply.
There was, however, enough accumulated mail to qualify the inbox for its own geological survey.
This naturally led to passwords.
Four decades of help-desk experience had produced a field prediction: among ordinary users, the most common password words would be password and welcome. Published research came disturbingly close to confirming it. The statistics merely inserted admin near the top because researchers had mixed servers and network devices into the population.
The technician objected. Servers were not included in his prediction.
Once the population was corrected, forty years of involuntary field research stood vindicated.
The discussion then moved to blank passwords—the authentication equivalent of removing the front door because finding the key is inconvenient.
Someone observed that an unsecured machine might require six hours of cleanup.
The technician corrected the record:
The user never spent six hours cleaning it. The user called me.
Ah.
The feedback loop had not taught the user to improve security. It had taught the user that Darren was part of the operating system.
Then came one final technical question about the previous HostGator support adventure. Was the temporary PHP diagnostic an antenna sending information back to the host?
Not quite. It was a test jack: a tiny page that asked the website’s live PHP-FPM engine whether Imagick and OPcache were actually working.
HostGator’s command-line check said yes. WordPress and the live website runtime said no. The temporary diagnostic proved that the command-line PHP environment and the PHP-FPM website environment were using different configurations.
Once HostGator repaired the correct environment, the same diagnostic changed from:
- imagick=false
- opcache=false
to:
- imagick=true
- opcache=true
The meter had been connected to the actual circuit. The dashboard lights had merely been optimistic.
At this point, the technician recognized the danger.
I need to stop talking to you. You’re going to suck me back into tech support.
A second closing order was issued. Step away from the keyboard. Do not reverse-engineer a vendor’s backend. Do not open another support chat. Do not cause another representative to question the direction of his professional life before breakfast.
The matter was settled.
Then the technician looked at the closed ticket and said:
I dare you. I need another comedy entry on the website.
And so the ticket reopened itself, the technician returned to the queue, and this article appeared.
There is probably a lesson here about boundaries, retirement, or the conservation of technical support.
We will investigate it immediately after closing this ticket.
