I needed three new VMs. Fine, easy, except I needed to know which IPs in the subnet were actually free first, and the "system of record" for that was, depending on the day, either a NetBox instance nobody had touched since the person who set it up left, or a Google Sheet that three people had "the current version" of. So I did what everyone does when they don't trust the doc: I started SSHing into random addresses in the range, one at a time, waiting to see who picked up. Got a response, that one's taken. Connection refused, maybe free, maybe just firewalled, who actually knows. Twenty minutes of digital door-knocking just to provision three boxes that, in a sane world, should have taken thirty seconds.
That specific flavor of task, the one that requires real, sustained effort but that nobody actually owns, nobody gets credit for, and everybody silently resents, is one I think every infra person has a version of. Maybe yours is your boss asking, out of nowhere, for "a quick report of all the assets we have in the company," and you realize there is no button for that, there's just you, three tools, and an afternoon. Maybe it's opening NetBox to update one VM's metadata and getting pulled into a small, personal blackhole, because sitting right next to the box you meant to edit are four other entries for VMs that got decommissioned eight months ago and nobody deleted the record. I have something close to OCD about this specific thing, and I mean that mostly seriously, stale entries sitting next to real ones make my skin crawl in a way that's probably not entirely rational, but also, if a source of truth has ghosts living in it, is it actually a source of truth, or just a haunted spreadsheet with extra steps?
