The Ghost in the Server: One Technician’s Descent into Chaos

From a Simple Script to a System’s Collapse: Uncovering the Madness, Guilt, and Lessons of an IT Catastrophe

The kindest thing in the world, I believe, is that the human mind cannot connect all its thoughts at once. Yet, in these times of constant connection, where it’s easy to piece together unrelated knowledge, can anything stay hidden, separated, and broken apart, never to come together and sink into someone’s mind?

My understanding of these ideas started long ago when I worked at Initech.

That’s when I first saw the madness hiding inside my mind, my soul, and my dreams—madness that still haunts me today.

I write this story hoping to find some relief and maybe even peace.

I began my career at Initech as a low-level tech worker, but as the company grew, so did my job. Initech expanded rapidly, buying up other firms and adding new people and resources. This growth led to a deal with IBM, which transformed our systems. We moved our ERP system to AIX, IBM’s version of Unix.

Soon after, Initech bought Minitech, a tough rival.

As a technician, my job was to keep the internal systems running. Many employees worked from home, so we depended on remote consoles and telnet connections through the Korn shell. These connections were fragile modems failed, lines crackled with noise, and files often got corrupted with random characters.

Those corrupted files were a constant problem. Usually, I avoided dealing with them, but during the Minitech merger, I decided to do something.

I wanted to give our new colleagues a clean system, free of these junk files. I wrote a simple script to move all proper files to a temporary folder and then delete the corrupted ones with one command. At first, the script worked well on just a few directories. I was happy to see the system cleaned. Buoyed by this, I ran it across the entire file system, deleting directories one after another.

But I made a big mistake—I ran it on the root directory.

The screen froze, and a cold feeling hit me as I understood what I had done. The server depended on those files. Moving them had crippled the whole system. That night, I couldn’t sleep.

My mind was filled with fear and guilt over the mess I caused.

The next morning, I went back into the office, expecting the worst. Yet, to my surprise, Marie, the project manager, sat calmly in the break room, drinking coffee. She didn’t know what had happened. We then went to her office. When she tried to access the server and couldn’t, she pulled out an old, strange key from her drawer. She told me it was for the server and was used only in emergencies.

We headed down to the server room, a dark basement I had never seen before.

There, among messy wires and strange equipment, sat the AIX server, locked inside a metal cage. Marie used the key to open a special access panel. She linked her device directly to the system’s core. She typed commands, but many were missing—probably lost when I created the temporary directory. We used a simple copy command to restore some files, but the system remained unstable. There was little else we could do.

Marie called IBM support. Soon, a team of men arrived with tools and strange devices. They took control of the server, telling us to wait outside. I never saw what they did, but by evening, the server was running again.

It looked like a broken version of itself. It worked, but it ran badly. Bugs and scars from that day still show.

Initech kept growing by buying other companies, but the old ERP system stayed. It was always close to being replaced but was never shut down. Marie left shortly after, taking her knowledge with her. I gathered all the evidence I could find—an endless stream of ticket requests, IBM service orders, Marie’s unfinished report, and ongoing bug reports. I stored everything on a USB drive along with this story. I know too much, and the chaos inside me keeps growing. I believe my time at Initech is ending, just like Marie’s did. I hope that if anyone finds this story after me, they will see the warning and make sure the broken ERP, still hidden away in its basement cage, is never started again.