Bearly a fire - by Stuart - Five nines in the void
Five nines in the void
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Bearly a fire<br>People Resources clarifies that being eaten by a bear without prior notice is a violation of unlimited PTO policies
Stuart<br>Jul 14, 2026
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“Dan was eaten by a bear this weekend,” said Tab Johnson. His team of software engineers stood in a circle for their daily standup meeting.
The unaccounted threat to sprint velocity. Dan is inside, undergoing an unscheduled, destructive ETL process inside the bear. Photo by Becca via Unsplash<br>“A bear? How did that happen?” asked Colin, distressed.<br>Tab looked down and shook his head. “Dan was camping out in the woods. We don’t know what happened precisely, but we do know the result. Dan’s laptop, full of invaluable contributions to our company, was smacked out of his hand by a bear. I looked at his GitHub history, and it doesn’t look like he was able to push his latest changes before the bear mauled him to death.” Tab paused. “I know this is difficult to hear.”<br>“This is awful news,” Laura said, tears welling up in her eyes.<br>“Yeah, tell me about it. Dan had all the context on the authentication system project. Without his institutional knowledge or his latest changes, we might not meet our Q1 OKRs,” Tab said.<br>Laura’s jaw dropped. “That’s horrible. That’s not what —”<br>“It is horrible,” Tab interrupted, “but don’t worry, we’ll have a full debrief at our retro meeting later today.”<br>Colin’s eyes widened. “This is much bigger than a retro action item, Tab.”<br>Tab pointed two finger-snapping pistols in Colin’s direction. “The senior perspective. Just what we need.” He rubbed his chin. “You’re right, this is a fire. We’re going to declare a fire.”<br>“A fire is for incidents that threaten the revenue of the company,” Colin said.<br>“Precisely. I’m sending out the alert.”<br>The fire squad
Five minutes later, the fire paging system sent out an alert to a rotating squad of on-call engineers. They all assembled in a meeting room, the first step in the engineering fire standard operating procedure (SOP).<br>Scooter, the designated fire commander, had the honor of pairing his flannel shirt with a fireman’s hat and reading aloud the fire report: “A bear ate Dan before he could push valuable updates and context on the authentication project.”<br>“Oh my god, a bear?” said Ziggy, one of the on-call engineers. Ziggy’s eyes darted left and right, his breathing quickening. “Why is this happening to me?”<br>The next step in a fire was to return the system to the last stable state as quickly as possible and mitigate data loss.<br>“The system is already in a stable state, but there was some institutional data loss. We’ll need to pummel this fire into submission,” Jennifer said while flexing her arms, which were jutting out of her sleeveless UFC shirt. “Actually, the data might be recoverable from either the Dan grey matter or laptop hard drives. We’ll pummel the data out of those drives!” She started to shadowbox.<br>Scooter shook his head, nearly toppling the fireman’s hat on his head. “The grey matter hard drive! What in tarnation? Now you’re talking science fiction. We need to base this conversation on reality. "<br>“No, it’s not science fiction. ForeverAI has a prototype. I can reach out to their CEO, Evan Dusk,” said Jennifer. “He’s a good sport even though I schooled him the last time we rolled.”<br>“Alright, folks. We need to split up. Someone needs to get the laptop and grey matter hard drives, and someone else needs to get hold of this prototype. With the two hard drives, we should be able to let’er buck and recover the company data,” said Scooter. “Ziggy, can you fetch the hard drives?”<br>Ziggy buried his hands in his face, shaking. “Why me?”<br>The retro
The time for retro came around a few hours later. They all looked at a spreadsheet with columns labeled “went well”, “to improve”, and “wondering about”. Tab had written “Bear-related data loss” in the “to improve” column.<br>After waiting a few minutes for everyone on the team to contribute their thoughts, Tab started the discussion. “I wrote this item down. We need a bear-resistant data retention strategy so we don’t fail our SOC2 audit this year. The C-Suite is very concerned. Failing that audit would imperil many pending deals.”<br>“This is a challenging problem to solve, Tab. I can think of a few different strategies. For starters, we could not allow engineers to work outdoors in bear country,” Colin said.<br>“I think that’s the smartest,” Laura piped in.<br>“That’s a non-starter, Colin. Every American has a god-given right to work in bear country. We can’t take that freedom away,” Tab said<br>“Okay. So we can’t get to zero risk. Perhaps we can harden our data retention systems to decrease the residual risk to an acceptable tolerance. We’d probably need a meeting with Cybersecurity to get their buy-in on this.”<br>Tab sighed. “What else?”<br>“We prioritize a spike ticket this sprint to investigate data loss reduction in the aftermath of bear encounters. We could look...