Monica was a Git retroarchaeologist. Well— technically not only Git— but it had been ages since she had had to type `hg` into her term.
Today was the kind of day she loved, and hated. Loved, because this was work she genuinely enjoyed-- and loved because this, and the fact that vanishingly few people could pull it off-- meant the pay was good.
Hated, because it was like hashing a stack of zipcoin. The distributed rebase was going to take 14 days 7 hours to complete (she didn't call these "estimates" anymore— they were certainties) and eat computing power enough to heatsim an entire avoset. Worse, it would tie up the better part of the databridge, leaving only a trickle of compute left for the actual scientists and industrials. They, who would not hate her for it, because they (of anyone) understood the importance of her work, but they, who she would feel should hate her for it. But honest workers did not shoot the messenger; that was left for corp-execs. No mind, dwelling on this side, the decision-making side, would also sap her happiness, so she did not.
She had to remind herself: it wasn't only they, the worker types, performing useful labour. She was one, too. It was only that they understood and accepted this better than she.
And this is why Monica, in a small cuboidey port of her mind, felt like a pariah when she sent the T-1 minute notification on hubstack, and even moreso when flame emojis bounced back in the gutter.
But in a still smaller compartment of her mind, ovalesque, she knew she was no paraiah, she was a maestro, and about to begun babysitting.
She had completed the final validation last week, and then another final validation yesterday, and a final final final this morning (launch was 10am, of course.) Her term was epoxied-in, so that the databridge warmup, before the workload was really handled over (and the bridge itself epoxied, of course, which was always step 1) would not be sidelined by updates. She idly thought about how annoying and complex it was to prepare the cluster this way, but anyways.
It was fine, it was going to be fine. The corporation, like many, changed ticketing systems every 4 to 6 years. There was simply no evading the rebase to update the ticket numbers as part of the migration. Other, higher paid artists would handle Jira itself.
The countdown running in term 2 completed. It was time.
She hit enter and sat.