Good Start But Where's the Punch Line?

Story: 'It's easier than Linux, so what's the problem?'Total Replies: 2
Author Content
dotmatrix

May 28, 2017
2:26 PM EDT
What happened to 'fish'?

What happened to the company?

Did 'fish' go on to start a GNU/Linux services company?

I feel like I've been led into a cliffhanging trap.
mbaehrlxer

May 30, 2017
10:56 AM EDT
how about everyone contribute their own ending to the story. i'll start:

fish quickly found a new job as linux sysadmins are in high demand. the company however had a problem. they hired an MSCE who could not understand the documentation fish left behind. not really surprising as it is very difficult to write documentation for an unknown target. the MSCE or course blamed fish for his failure, and from a certain perspective he was right. he could hardly be expected to know anything about linux if he didn't have any experience with it. so the company rebuilt their infrastructure from scratch using windows. and after a year of messing around, they still were not able to replace their old running systems. the MSCE gave up and handed in his resignation, claiming unreasonable expectations from the company.

in the meantime fish had another bad experience at his new job, (these kind of things seem to follow him around) and he decided to become a freelancer. looking for clients he got curious and checked on his old company. with the resignation of the MSCE on their table, they were desperate to hire a new sysadmin, and asked fish if he wanted to come back. he didn't but he offered to help them on a contracting basis, for double the cost that the company would had to spend for him as an employee.

fish had been learning more about windows in the meantime, mostly so he could better understand why linux was better, and so he could explain it to his superiors and clients. armed with that knowledge he went into his old company and started to sort things out. all his old servers were still running, needing barely any maintenance except a few upgrades here and there to close any security holes that were discovered in the past year.

together with the leaving MSCE he looked over the new windows servers and found that they were actually set up quite well. that MSCE wasn't an idiot, he knew his stuff. it's just that the company expected the windows servers to handle the same load as the linux servers, and they just could not. they created some reports that showed the difference and explained why this was the case. the MSCE was intrigued, and the bosses asked both of them if they could fix it.

fish wrote up a report that explained what they needed to do. which was mostly to switch all servers to linux, and then they would handle the load as expected. add in a load-balancing system and some rented cloud servers to handle spikes, and they would be good to go.

the MSCE offered two options. first he wrote a report explaining how many more windows machines they would have to add so that windows could handle the load. he added up the expense for the licenses they would need and calculated the cost for the whole project.

shocked by the price, the company asked about the second option.

"well, ..." the MSCE said, "we could use linux..."

greetings, eMBee.
dotmatrix

May 30, 2017
4:08 PM EDT
@eMBee:

I really like that ending. I don't think I would change a thing. Probably true too.

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