When Misplaced Trust Leads to Ruin

Jake was active on Instagram.

One post showed him standing in the server room, posing with my workstation and flashing a peace sign. The caption was clearly aimed at me.

"Taking over the core position and cleaning up an old fart's mess. System efficiency improved by 30%!"

Another one came later that night. A photo of a cup of instant noodles was captioned, "Going all out for the launch. The most romantic thing for a tech guy is watching code fly across the screen."

Some coworkers left comments of approval. Martin even left a thumbs-up emoji.

I couldn't help but scoff at his old-fart remark. What he called a mess was probably my thermal control service and load-balancing scripts.

Although the workstation might've been powerful, it unfortunately ran hot—terribly.

Without my throttling logic, and now with summer heat and a cramped server room, I could already hear the fans screaming at full speed.

On Friday night, I received a text message from the front desk lady.

"Ms. Chapman, are you up? Jake just turned off the server room AC, saying it's to save electricity. It's like a sauna in there now. I can hear the machines humming like crazy from outside. Will everything be okay?"

What a genius he was, turning off precision air-conditioning just to save a few hundred bucks off the power bill.

I replied, "Just follow management's instructions. It's fine."

I put my phone down and walked to the balcony, looking at the brightly lit central business district in the distance.

The workstation's GPU thermal ceiling was 185 degrees Fahrenheit. Once it crossed that threshold, the hardware protection system would kick in and force clock throttling.

And if someone tried to disable the protection manually, the GPU would burn.

…

Soon, Monday came. The cloud launch was set for 10:00 am.

It wasn't a small internal demo. Dozens of investment firms were watching online, and tens of thousands of early users were about to flood in.

For the company, it was make-or-break.

I didn't go to the office. Instead, I found a cafe near the company building and sat down with a cup of coffee. That was when Martin called. "Susan, where are you?"

His voice was tense, and I could hear chaos in the background.

"At home, reflecting on my mistakes," I answered. "What can I do for you, boss?"

"Come over immediately! Something's wrong with the servers! The fans are screaming! Jake thinks it's just a load spike. You know the system better, so come take a look. Maybe it's a configuration issue!"

A configuration issue? Well, of course.

That thermal control script Jake deleted didn't just manage temperature. It also handled voltage smoothing and prevented power surge-induced breakdowns.

"Mr. Miller, I'm on suspension, remember?"

I looked out into the crowd outside the window. "Besides, isn't Jake the talented top expert you hired? He said my approach old-school and hacky, so I'd rather not interfere."

"Now is not the time for this, Susan!" Martin snapped. "If you fix it now, I'll refund your fine and double it back to you. Just get here!"

"Nope."

I hung up, then blocked his number.

At 10:00 am, the launch went live.

I opened the livestream on my phone. On screen, Jake stood on stage with unbeatable confidence. Behind him, the giant display showed real-time system metrics.

"Investors, users, our cloud platform is built on a cutting-edge private cloud architecture. It delivers extreme responsiveness and stability…"

He hadn't even finished his introduction when the data on the screen froze. Then, the entire display started glitching, breaking into blocks of heavy pixelation.

The livestream chat exploded.

"Is it seriously lagging?"

"That server is trash. That's it? It's already crashing?"

"So much for extreme responsiveness. LOL."

I could almost picture what was happening in the server room.

Four high-end GPUs running at full load, with no air conditioning, no thermal control scripts, and possibly even forced into unstable overclock states. It was basically a silicon furnace in there.