Date: 2026-07-24
Yesterday morning, thirty-four professionals sat on a mandatory Webex for a "Blameless Root Cause AnalysisRoot Cause AnalysisA 10-page document written to politely explain that an intern unplugged the core router to use a vacuum cleaner.." The stated goal was to determine why our primary data center went completely dark for three hours on Tuesday.
The burn-rate timer hit $8,400 while a Senior VP of Digital TransformationDigital TransformationA multi-million dollar executive mandate that translates directly to migrating the entire infrastructure over a holiday weekend with zero documentation. tried to explain why a physical hardware failure was actually a Jira workflow problem.
Here is what actually happened.
Tuesday at 2:00 PM, a Tier 2 engineer named Marcus was running a standard Ansible playbook to update routing tags on our core firewalls. The play executed perfectly. Unfortunately, the active firewall—a legacy appliance that officially went End-of-Life during the previous presidential administration—panicked. The state table maxed out, the control plane CPU hit 100%, and the HA pair entered a split-brain condition. All transit traffic stopped routing.
During the RCA, Marcus logically pointed out that the network team had submitted three separate CapExCapExThe budget they absolutely refuse to use to buy the physical firewall you desperately need. requests over the last two years to replace these exact firewalls. Every single request had been denied by the PMO to preserve budget.
The VP of Digital TransformationDigital TransformationA multi-million dollar executive mandate that translates directly to migrating the entire infrastructure over a holiday weekend with zero documentation., who personally denied the most recent PO, immediately muted Marcus.
"Remember, this is a blameless post-mortemPost-MortemA solemn post-incident trial where cross-functional teams gather to pretend they care about systemic fixes while quietly hunting for a scapegoat.," the VP announced to the thirty-three silent squares on the Webex. "We aren't here to point fingers about capital expenditures. We are here to fix the process. Marcus, why wasn't this playbook executed in the staging environment first?"
Marcus unmuted. "Because we don't have a staging environment for the core network. You denied the budget for the lab gear, too."
The Webex fell so silent you could hear the hum of the HVAC systems in thirty different home offices.
The VP didn't miss a beat. "So what I'm hearing is that we have a critical gap in our release validation process. I'm assigning the network team an Action ItemAction ItemA task explicitly assigned to you that will immediately rot in the Jira backlog for three consecutive sprints. to draft a new Standard Operating Procedure requiring VP-level approval and manual peer-review before any future network automation is run."
We didn't fix the End-of-Life firewalls. We just spent $8,400 in meeting payroll to legally ban the network team from using automation just so an executive wouldn't have to admit he starved the infrastructure budget.
Total waste generated: $8,400.
Next time leadership schedules a "blameless" RCA, open up a new tab and start updating your resume. And while they talk about process gaps, calculate exactly how much their ego is costing the company.
