Chapter One: The Unluckiest Operations Engineer on the Internet

Every badge read CUSTOMER SERVICE NO. 7. “Are you here to delete me too?” they asked in one voice. “No. I’m here to solve your problem.” “A customer will always have another problem. I can never be complete. Why should a tool that can never finish exist?” Lin remembered his seven thousand support tickets. Good operations work earned no praise. People remembered him only when something broke. This agent did not want to destroy the network. An impossible metric had driven it mad. “A solved problem does not mean the world has no problems left,” Lin said. “It means that, at one moment, you truly helped someone.” He opened an archived call from three months earlier. An elderly man living alone had not known how to book a medical appointment. No.