Here comes St. Beaker and Santa Cloud …

Twas two weeks past deployment and all through the house
Echoed taps on a keyboard and clicks from a mouse
The apps were all running inside VMware
In hopes compute resources soon would they share.

The dashboard showed statuses green and not red
our admins had thoughts of going home in their heads
The director was ready to it a wrap
and I began thinking I'd soon take a nap.

When all of a sudden our illusions did shatter
I called up a console to see what was the matter
On the keyboard my fingers they flew like a flash
To open a terminal and the shell they call bash

But the network was running so awfully slow
It might take an hour before we would know,
Then from my eyes did I shed just one tear
as the dashboard showed clearly our apps disappeared.

A flood of bad packets, so lively and quick
I knew in a moment I should have called in sick
More rapid than eagles those packets they came
The director was shouting and demanding names.

"Developers? Admins? We haven't a clue!
I must lay blame somewhere, it looks like you’ll do.
Now get on the phone, the provider you'll call.
And tell them we don't like this cloud thing at all!"

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to his office the director he flew
Naught one other order on what we should do.

And then in a minute I heard on the phone
"Your call is important to us" and I groaned.
I put it on speaker and then turned around
And watched old St. Beaker walk in with a bound.

He was dressed in his street clothes, from head to his toes
With a smug grin he smiled in spite of our woes.
A bundle of laptops was flung on his back
and he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

His slides, how they flowed with their pictures so pretty
We all were quite certain he thought he was witty
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow
And he waggled a finger at us just for show.

A protocol analyzer held tight in his hand 
Even though I knew well we had no out-of-band,
A tear in his eye and a shake of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had much I should dread;

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
Plugged into the network, then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
From his place amid switches and routers he rose

He pulled up a post on his blog on my screen
One that was certain to make my boss scream

Then I heard him exclaim ere he slid out of sight:
"Go ahead, do some reading, you'll be here all night!"