The first month of the retainer was strange. I was back in the building, but not as an employee. I had a badge that said "Contractor" in red letters. I parked in the visitor lot. I sat in a temporary office on the third floor, not the data center floor, and I worked through the backlog of documentation I had been trying to create for years.
The new operations director was a woman named Sandra Okonkwo. She had come from a utility company, and she understood infrastructure the way I did: as something that had to be maintained, not just managed. She asked me questions. She wrote things down. She didn't pretend to know more than she did.
"We're going to fix this," she said on her second day. "But I need you to tell me everything. Every workaround. Every patch. Every time you saved this place
