Christmas Eve Hopefully a short day!
Chris entered the office with a glimmer of hope. The end of the year was near, and most of the staff were already in holiday mode—or, better yet, out of the office entirely. Wearing his “Ho Ho No” sweater and clutching his usual oversized coffee, he dared to dream of a quiet day. But IT never rests, especially not during the holidays.
The first clue that the day would be anything but peaceful came when he opened his ticket dashboard. A pile of urgent requests awaited him, each one more ridiculous than the last. Christmas chaos has officially begun, he thought, rolling up his sleeves.
The Printer’s Festive Meltdown
The first call came from Karen in accounting. “Chris, the printer isn’t working, and I need to print payroll checks for the Christmas bonuses!”
Chris rushed to the printer, finding it blinking with an error message he’d never seen before: “ERROR: Santa Mode Activated.”
“Karen, what did you do?” Chris asked, staring at the display.
“Oh, I thought it would be fun to print the checks with a holiday border, so I updated the printer software. Isn’t it cute?”
Chris sighed and reset the firmware. The printer refused to print anything unless loaded with “holiday paper.” Once he fixed it, Karen gave him a cheerful, “You’re amazing, Chris!” before returning to her desk.
“Yeah, Merry Christmas, Karen,” he muttered, already exhausted.
The Great Wi-Fi Crash
Just as Chris settled back at his desk, Bob from sales stormed in. “Chris! The Wi-Fi’s down! I’ve got e-cards to send, and I’m not missing my client deadlines.”
Chris checked the network and discovered the problem. The bandwidth was maxed out. After a quick scan, he uncovered the culprit: Steve in marketing had connected every TV in the break room to a 4K livestream of a 24-hour Yule log video.
“Steve, why are you streaming a fireplace on every screen?” Chris demanded.
“It’s for morale,” Steve replied innocently. “Holiday spirit, you know?”
Chris rolled his eyes, cut the stream, and restored the network. “Next time, one screen. Maybe two. But not all of them.”
Jemma and the Vanishing Cookie List
At 10:45, Chris got a call from Jemma in HR, who was in a full-blown panic. “Chris, my computer’s broken! I’ve been working on the holiday cookie exchange list all morning, and now it’s gone!”
Chris arrived at her desk to find her saving everything to a temporary cache file instead of the shared drive.
“Jemma, the cache clears itself. You need to save your files to the drive,” Chris explained, moving her document to the proper location.
“Oh! That’s what Jack used to do for me. Thanks, Chris!” Jemma said, relieved. “By the way, how do you spell ‘snickerdoodle’?”
Chris walked away, muttering, “With patience.”
The Christmas Lights Catastrophe
By mid-afternoon, Steve appeared in Chris’s doorway again, looking alarmed. “Chris, the lights in the server room are flickering. Something’s wrong.”
Chris hurried to the server room, only to find Linda, the CEO’s assistant, happily plugging in a web of blinking Christmas lights.
“Linda, you can’t overload the power in the server room!” Chris exclaimed, horrified.
“But it looks so festive!” Linda protested.
“Festive isn’t worth crashing the entire network,” Chris replied, unplugging the lights and leaving Linda to sulk.
The North Pole Hack
At 2:30 PM, an alert flashed on Chris’s screen: “Unauthorized login attempt detected. Source: North Pole.”
“What in the world?” Chris muttered, diving into the security logs. After some investigation, he found the real problem: Steve had changed the system’s location settings to display festive destinations as part of a holiday prank.
“Steve!” Chris said, dragging him into the IT room. “You changed our alerts to say the attacks are coming from the North Pole?”
Steve grinned. “It’s funny, right?”
Chris glared at him. “You’re lucky I don’t rewrite your credentials to ‘Santa’sHelper123.’”
The Frozen Presentation
Just when Chris thought he might survive the day, Linda burst in again. “Chris! The CEO’s holiday presentation froze, and he’s giving it in five minutes!”
Chris raced to the conference room, where the CEO stood glaring at the screen. A corrupted PowerPoint file had left the slides completely unusable.
Thinking quickly, Chris pulled up a backup version, reformatted the slides, and got the presentation running with seconds to spare. The CEO nodded in approval. “Good work, Chris.”
“Thanks,” Chris said, hiding his exhaustion. “Merry Christmas.”
The Final Straw
At 5:00 PM, just as Chris was packing up to leave, his phone buzzed. It was Karen again.
“Chris, the printer’s out of toner! HELP!”
Chris stared at his phone for a moment, turned it off, and grabbed his bag. “Not today, Karen. Not today.”
Walking out into the snowy evening, Chris couldn’t help but laugh. The holidays in IT were chaos, sure—but they were also kind of magical.
“Merry Christmas to all,” he muttered with a grin, “and to all a glitch-free night.”