So... this is all you do all day is it?"

"Most days. Other days Carl or Peter does it."

"Carl or Peter?"

"Yeah, we work shifts - because the market never sleeps."

"So let me get this straight. You don't have any servers, you don't have any real work - AND THERE ARE THREE OF YOU - so you just make problems to keep yourself in a job?"

"Yep, That's pretty much it." //

A minute of silence passes, then finally the geek cracks. There's no server hardware. Nothing. Over the last five years the entire company operation has moved into online services - theoretically leaving our geek with no job.

"So what do you... do all day?" the PFY asks.

"SOME days, I'll take a complete snapshot of our cloud infrastructure," he says.

"Once a month you mean?" the PFY surmises. "So what do you do with the rest of your time?"

"I, um, manufacture outages," he admits.

"Manufacture outages?"

"Yeah, I'll light up the RED lamp on a server and, uh, take a cloud service offline."

"Why?"

"Because then they'll call me and get me to fix it. I'll bring them in here, fire up a linux laptop with the Matrix screensaver, edit a JPEG with a Hex editor, pretend to find a virus signature or an internal consistency error, then 'fix' it and bring the service back online again."

It seems so simple now that he says it.