I’m moving an application out of my Azure subscription into the corporate cloud. I’m trying to get assets stood up for production. I can’t pull a docker image from our repository to my web app service. Last week, I put in a ticket for this. I thought it was another whitelisting/firewall issue. I copied the error message I get in the logs, which has the timestamp, and suggested they could look at their logs for that timestamp to corroborate.
The ticket got picked up yesterday. “Still a problem?” “Yes.” It’s always still a problem.
Get a call this morning. “Please show me.” “But I sent the error in the ticket.” “Yeah, yeah, please share your screen.”
I can barely understand her. For part of the call, I can’t hear, because she’s scraping something around on the desk. The rest of the time, I can barely hear, because garbled call center chatter is cutting through the “background suppression” on her mic.
I do the thing. I watch in almost-horror as it works flawlessly this time. I know I will never understand what has just happened. Anathema to me. I need to know so that I don’t have to fool with this in the future. “OK, it worked this time. What changed?” Mumbles. She wants to end the call and close the ticket.
I decide it’s not worth the hassle of the language barrier and the technology friction on the off-chance that she could actually tell me why it wasn’t working before, and why it’s working now, so I tell her she can close the ticket and end the call.
This is my life now. AI does almost all of the actual coding, and I try to get infrastructure setup like I’m trying to assemble a watch inside a closed box with someone else’s hands. Still challenging, to be sure, but not the kind of challenging that has lit my fires and made me love what I do for 30 years.