It was 7am when my phone rang. Instead of an alarm, it was my recruiter disturbing me from a pleasant dream. It was too early for a phone call or to be caught off guard, so I did not answer. I went to take a shower and get ready for the day. On my way to work, I listened to the voice mail she had left.
"Oh my God, are you OK!"
In the company's directory, there are several people that shared the same first and last name as me. I was OK. So she must have dialed the wrong phone number. I assumed somewhere, an employee named Ibrahim Diallo, was in trouble. But not me.
At work, when I scanned my key card at the turnstile, it flashed red, made a grumpy beep, and refused to disengage. I tried it a few more times, it kept flashing red and grumping. I threw a glance at Jose and made sure to make eye contact. He shrugged. A moment later he laughed then pressed a button under his desk and the turnstile turned open. Jose was one of the security guards in the LA-1 skyscraper I worked in.
I immediately called the recruiter back and it went something like this:
Recruiter: Did you have a talk with your manager yesterday?
Me: Yes I did.
R: Is everything OK?
M: Yes, everything is OK. Is there a problem?
R: I'm not sure, I received an email about you this morning... I guess it must have been a mistake. Did they let you in the building?
M: I don't understand. Yes, they let me in the building. What is happening?
R: I think there is a confusion. I'll ask my manager then I will call you back.
Jose has seen me come to work everyday through those doors for more than half a year. I believe this was his idea of a joke. He must have disabled the turnstile right before I was to scan my key card. I went straight to my manager to see "If everything was OK."
Me: Hi!
Sam (manager): Hi Ibrahim, how are you?
Me: I'm fine. I received a call from my recruiter. Did you want to talk to me?
Sam: No, I don't think so. Did she tell you what the problem was?
Me: No. She said she will call me back. I'll wait for her call, I guess.
I did not receive a call from her. Nothing interesting happened on that day, just good Ol' work routine.
The next day I drove my car to the parking structure and heard the same grumpy beep when I scanned my card. There was a long line of cars forming behind me, the drivers were getting impatient and some had started to honk at me already. It's a long one way corridor where getting out of the lane was not an option. I silently panicked. A security guard appeared, gave me a look, shook his head disappointed, then used his own card to let me in. I embarrassingly drove all the way to the 8th floor.
Inside the building, my card failed again, and the loud grumpy beep made sure everyone was aware of it. Jose let me in once more.
It wasn't the first time my key card failed, I assumed it was time to replace it. As soon as I got to my floor, I went to see my manager to let her know. She promised to order me a new one right away. In the meanwhile, every morning the security guard would have to print a temporary badge for me that would expire by 7pm. Small price to pay.
I went to my desk and worked for a few hours on hardware. When I was done, I logged into my Windows machine to mark my Jira ticket as completed, that's when I noticed that I had been logged out of Jira. I tried my jira credentials multiple times and they did not work.
On my floor, there was a poster at the very entrance. An employee made a New Yorker style comic with two employees talking from across their cubicles. These were the words:
Is JIRA down?
Yes, JIRA is down!
Jira is always down. So I asked my coworker in the next cubicle if JIRA was working for him. He answered Yes. Then I asked him to look for my ticket number. He opened it. Right next to my name on this ticket, it had the word (Inactive) and my name was grayed out.
That's something the manager could sort out, but it was lunch time. I went down to the cafeteria and ordered a nice black bean burger, a healthy diet is important if your work consists off sitting down all day. I went for my usual after-lunch one mile walk, again this counters sitting down all day.
Of course, when I come back, I take the stairs up to the 11th floor. Very hard, but you know, sitting down all day is not good. The only problem was that I forgot that when I reached the 11th floor, I would have to scan my key card to leave the stairs. That card reader reminded me with the slowest, meanest, and grumpiest beep an 8 bit machine could make. I was stuck on the stairs. I sat there for 10 minutes until a fellow stair taker opened the door for me. I sneaked into the floor like a common thief.
That's when my recruiter called me in panic apologizing again and asking if everything was OK. She told me she had received an email saying I was terminated. I told my manager right away, and she was surprised because she received no such information. She couldn't understand why my JIRA was disabled but the system wouldn't allow her to enable my account