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We all called him Angry Bear, but his name was Mike.

Angry Bear was a family man, and Angry Bear was here because of family. His brother in law worked for the company - had been hired on at seventeen. After a year or two of late night fiber rigging and Internet building, Mike was looking for something with less stress. Had I known him better at the time, I might have sent him to go ride ambulances or something.

A big, burly man with the mouth of an MP and the alcohol tolerance of a Brit, Angry Bear - Mike - had seen some shit. He cared about a lot of things. Maybe too much. When Mike saw things going wrong, Mike wanted to fix things. It quickly became apparent that there was no fixing the NOC. And so Mike got frustrated.

Angry Bear had the dubious pleasure of sharing the twelve hour overnight shifts with me. They never took him off for the same reason I never came off - we were too good at our job. Besides, we were the only ones who never slept. I downed Penguin Mints at a rate not recommended by the Surgeon General. Mike, having done this shit before, drank coffee mixed with the cheap cocoa packets every data center inflicts on their staff.

He had a temper on him. Maybe still does. If Angry Bear thought you'd fucked up, he'd let you know in some blunt, harsh terms - most often, the lazy-ass fundamentalist Christian with a taste for Hogan's Heroes got hit with this. It was a slow burn, generally - a genial smile followed by a "what the fuck is wrong with you" lecture that lasted for maybe five minutes. Thankfully, I only got this once, after I had the man drive twenty minutes to my site with the wrong part.

Oops.

Anyway, Mike drank. God did Mike drink. He drank like it was communion and penance for his sins at the same time - and the more he drank, the louder he got. Mike drank a lot as things got worse in the NOC.

Things were always shit, you see. There was no fixing everything in these football stadium-sized warehouses full of servers and routers. Mike took to the clever route of gaming the metrics. He learned Perl. He did tickets in bulk. He resolved out duplicates - hell, we all did - to inflate our own worth in the eyes of the company. But the faster Mike worked, the more shit we installed, the more projects we completed, the more we built more.

We didn't hire very many folks. We hired a few good ones here and there - maybe 3-4 good techs a year while we bled talent and disaffected NOClings all over the landscape.

So Mike drank. Mike drank and got increasingly pissed off and stressed out. And there was nothing anyone could do. His brother in law was absent a lot - he was busy working on his XBox metrics - and his drinking was causing stress in his marriage. Or maybe that was the DUI.

Whatever the reason, alcohol was soon mixing with tranquilizers - or something meant to keep the stress induced arrhythmia from killing the man.

Being a good little codependent, I went drinking with Mike and the other NOC monkeys. I didn't say a word about mixing meds with alcohol. None of us did. It was a moot point - half the crew was on SSRIs and and other drugs meant to keep us from unloading firearms into the core network gear.

The company taught me about hard liquor, and hard liquor taught me about leaving my truck somewhere for the night and having my skeptical uncle or father drive me back to the bland suburban parking lot the next day. It taught me about DUI, the strategies and roads my coworkers took to avoid police checkpoints, and other problems that Angry Bear ran into.

Those were loud, riotous nights. We drank with our boss, who was fond of getting trashed and driving from Northern to West Virginia - two hours out - with his license suspended for an incident with pyrotechnics. We heard more about corporate politics over the sticky table at the bar. We were fixtures there - every Thursday or Friday night, the tab was well over $200 for the lot of us.

Even so, the last time I went drinking with Mike, he almost got us thrown out - Angry Bear was out in full force.

Three beers and two tranquilizer in, he started yelling. "Shit! Look at the nose on that Jewess! Shit! I've got a boner the size of goddamn Manhattan! Hey, you! Come over here!"

It took all four of us to get him the fuck out of the bar that night

There are twenty buildings ten technicians Five oncall shifts And four point eight terabits On the local dark fiber ring.

Last week, John wrapped his motorcycle around a tree. He was drunk: whiskey after a twenty hour shift. Now there are nine of us, twenty buildings, eighty-thousand servers and all the downstream routers for our local dark fiber ring.

We do it all: swap hard drives, run fiber. Fix the broken machines, install new ones. Write code, to run the fleet. I'm the nighttime - for all twenty buildings, four point eight terabits and our entire production network.

They told me in the beginning that they might give me a flamethrower send me to the roof to send tar. They haven't: but they have sent me into flames. They have sent me with ten million dollars in my truck at 3am to repair the dark fiber ring.

And each day, while I am sleeping, in each of the twenty buildings, ten trucks roll in, with two hundred more servers each. There are eight of us now. Kay was caught with pot: and is on parole.

He drops acid, continuously, and writes: automation. Ten thousand lines of Perl and Python, curling out over eighty-thousand servers in the night as Scott hangs a noose of CAT-5 in the breakroom and screams.

Scott is alone, when they come for him.

The RAID controllers scream all night: something is broken inside. Eighty thousand servers. Four point eight terabits. Twenty buildings. And now there are six of us - Jack lost his driving privileges in his last psychotic episode.

And we work for a hundred, hundred-twenty hours a week: we sleep in the embrace of whiskey, wake up and go fix the Internet. And the next day, ten-thousand of our servers are dead.

And I, I am alone, I am the night shift, one shaking truck in the night between Manassas and the Maryland border as my pager sings to me in the Virginia night. I am on the raised white floor of windowless buildings, and the air handlers howl.

I am bleeding from a thousand cuts. I am shaking with caffeine psychosis as I hold together this fragile ring of fiber, as I keep my company alive, as I stem the hemorrhaging light of the network.

I am alone, in the night, and I sleep with the sun, and I dream of a thousand forests that run riot over white floors, blinking routers, screaming controllers, I dream of my hands bleeding into motherboards, line cards broken under fungal mass, I hear the roar of the big machine, and I turn my face to a wind that's real.

Woo began his career at the company the right way. He grew up in a small town in the dustbowl of Eastern Washington, idling his way through high school and all too aware that he was exceptionally smart. It was some kind of American Dream bullshit: Woo was a slacker hacker who became a call center employee, then a call center tech, then a process and scripting guy. His talent was recognized by the company.

Promoted and transferred out of the dustbowl, he woke up one morning to movers untacking his Jimi Hendrix posters, his papasan chair, and his family’s collection of bongs. Woo moved to the big city, Washington DC, where he came to work in the same NOC I did.

On the surface, it was a great move, but Woo got no cost of living adjustment. He got a three dollar raise from something like eleven dollars an hour. He had to find a roommate in Virginia. Given the local culture, it’d be someone who didn’t approve of his Jimi Hendrix poster, his antique water pipe collection, or the stench of pot. Someone sat down with Woo to train him, concluded that Woo was smarter than him, and stopped training him.

We sent Woo off to swap hard drives and fix servers, and to Woo’s credit, he wasn’t bad at it. But there was something missing from Woo. It might have been the lack of giving a shit, maybe it was the non-existent training - maybe it was the absence of the ganja that’d kept Woo copacetic in the beige and cubicles of the company’s call center.

Maybe it was the ganja that kept Woo from pulling his weight on our team.

To be fair, we didn’t have the time to train him. Emergencies were boiling out of our queues, new data centers were coming online every other month, and the sheer amount of projects and broken hardware had buried all of us. Half the team was on antidepressants, and the other half was having psychotic breakdowns. It was a shitty kind of team: angry, isolated, abandoned, and bitterly aware that it was every man for himself.

And Woo wasn’t one of us. Woo sat and complained, and didn’t apply himself to his work. I’ll be frank: Woo was lazy, and he didn’t want the job. He didn’t understand the job and what it required, and he wasn’t hungry for the potential to change the world, especially after he was slighted with the shitty excuse for pay raise.

We wanted Woo to be more like Manny. Woo wasn’t like Manny, our representative model technician. Manny conned his way out of a cellphone sales stand, lied about knowing Linux, bullshitted all his troubleshooting questions, and somehow ended up programming new kernel patches three months later. He might have slept on a makeshift mattress of shipping blankets, building insulation, and cardboard when he was supposed to be working night shift, but the work got done.

You could bitch, that was the thing. We all did. But we bitched and then we did our jobs. Woo just bitched and got less and less effective. He never got better than he was when he got to the NOC, and all the terrible things that were part and parcel of everyday work ground him down. Little things like the floor collapsing under racks of servers, overheating network rooms, and the occasional fire in the building sapped his motivation. He just couldn’t adapt.

About eight months after Woo was moved to Virginia, he decided to tell a joke about how unhappy he was. It wasn't a very good joke.

Woo made a noose out of CAT-5 networking cable and hung it in the break room. A construction contractor, having snuck into the kitchen to steal the sugar canisters, spotted it and raised hue and cry about lynching jokes.

Circa August 2010 in Virginia, I sleep in a half-collapsed pair of twins tied together by straps, my face strapped into a foam blindfold. Black plastic ear protection loops over my ears, thick, dense, and powerfully engineered to retard both the sound of gunshots and the sound of children outside the front door of the apartment. Which is why my hand is clenched around a battered iPhone, and I come awake, peeking every so often under the blindfold at the phone. No text messages mean no pages. I fall back asleep for another. Wake up another hour later. Rinse, repeat.

The alarm goes off at 7:30, and I roll over, but do not reach for the lights. It's automatic now that the laptop (not quite as damaged as the phone) is flipped open, the power cord checked. Within sixty seconds of coming out of disgruntled sleep, I am logged into VPN, and plugged into a torrent of emails. Most are some four thousand health checks for servers that have died across the Northern Virginia landscape, scattered between buildings half an hour to an hour spaced.

As the emails roll in, I pop open the first tin of Penguin Mints, highly caffeinated little energy bombs, and toss six into my mouth. Chew, chew, swallow. The equivalent of two Mountain Dews is potent, and will have me mostly cognizant of where I need to go and what I need to do.

There's a filter, a page I've set up, that lists the highest severity alarms. This is reserved for transit network problems, downed racks, widespread issues, the failure of the massive fiber systems that allow those thousands of servers to talk to each other. Power issues. Cooling issues. It all shows up there. And unfortunately, that particular webpage, loaded through the filter, hasn't been empty for about a year now.

I am one of twelve, fifteen technicians spread across a twenty-four hour local shift. We are the only repairing hands in an infrastructure too big for us to handle. But, we are efficient. The huge, interlocking system is not too big to keep mostly online. Business continuity flows through our veins like blood and whiskey. And while we are given technicians from other global locations, they're slow. Unused to this scale of emergency, they have no idea how to function.

Today three of them are pigeonholed until ten PM in one data center. They will fix perhaps five servers. I will be going to all the other buildings. I will fix forty servers in a night, either onsite or remotely.

Two local coworkers, perhaps the most competent of the day shift, notice me come onto instant messenger. I learn that if I want to catch up with my manager, I'm late: he left at four in the afternoon to go to the bar.

I roll out of bed ten minutes later, scrape on black jeans, black t-shirt, and a black hoodie. I am comfortable in this, and I do not regard the circles under my eyes in the bathroom mirror as I scrape my hair back, unbrushed, into a rough ponytail.

By eight in the evening, the sun is dying a slow, bloody, glorious death in the Virginia sky, and the mugginess that chokes out the day has faded. As I start my aging pickup truck, I devour another three mints, and feel the caffeine start to take me. I have a fine tremor that almost feels something like being still, something like being calm. It is an intoxication, but it's also the razor edge of stress, the vague uncertainty that comes with having a problem too large to tackle.

Traffic is light. I make it to the first site in ten minutes, meet a technician outside of the double doors of the nicest of the facilities, the one I consider home base. He hands me a half-million dollar part and tells me I need to backtrack five minutes. There's an engineer on the West Coast eager to fix the interlinking fiber systems, and he's eager to go home.

I do not know if my coworker has children, and I don't care. Across Virginia, the remaining buildings go empty of technicians. They go home to eat dinner with their families and to sleep, done with their own twelve hour shifts. The visitors are inconsequential.

The next twelve, and the line card in my hands, are mine. Security guards remain at their posts. Fourteen empty buildings roaring with servers are mine at the swipe of a card. I creep through dusty rooms filled with switch gear and routers, with white tiles and immaculate steel baskets loaded to the brim with wire.

I get back in my truck, and drive there. An hour later, I drive forty minutes south, clean a pair of fiber links, hit the road again, and drive thirty minutes east. I don't stop until eight in the morning. Stranded in the middle of traffic, I take backroads back to where I live. I get home by ten AM if I'm lucky. By morning, the first tin of caffeinated mints, and two others are gone.

I have an hour with which to dose myself and get something like enough sleep for the next three nights on shift. Back home, in my wreckage of a bedroom, I strip, drink a glass of port, use it to wash down the large dose of melatonin I need to get anywhere close to sleep.

I strap the blindfold to my face, the ear protection to my head. I clutch the phone to my chest. I shake with the remnants of the caffeine until alcohol and sedative drag me under. Under my blanket, I begin to analyze and reanalyzewhat else is broken, what else I could have done. And finally, the fuzziness overwhelms me, and I sleep.