Release in October

Lyrics

Release in October

(English version — satirical spoken-word piece)

Narrator 1 (male, no music):
Welcome to this little story entitled Software Release in October.

(Background music starts softly – calm, cinematic, slightly tense.)

Narrator 1:
Monday, the seventh of October.
A quiet autumn morning in software development.
Teams are relaxed, fixing minor bugs, a last cup of coffee before the daily meeting.
Then, at ten forty-seven, the order comes from upper management:
“Release Eight Point Four – go live this week.”
From now on, events begin to escalate.

At first, the head of system operations reacts half-heartedly.
A new build script, a few additional tests.
But soon, the first container rolls into the test environment.

Narrator 2 (female):
Three fifteen p.m.
The backend team suddenly moves all stories to In Progress and starts a storm of merge requests.
In quality assurance, things are literally on fire:
A test server overheats because someone accidentally ran the load test on production.

Narrator 1:
Tuesday, the eighth of October, seven thirty a.m.
Database administrators report “unusual activity.”
A simple customer query now takes forty-seven minutes.
Meanwhile, the monitoring dashboard glows red with two hundred and sixty critical alerts.

Narrator 2:
Wednesday, the ninth of October, nine o’clock.
In the on-prem installations, mysterious containers appear.
No one knows who deployed them.
Nine twelve – the frontend team retaliates with heavy use of modern frameworks,
while the old module desperately clings to life.

Ten oh-five – an engineer gets lost in the cloud management console
and accidentally deletes the entire test environment.

Narrator 1:
Twelve o’clock noon.
A new directive from project management:
“Improve communication!”
A new chat channel is created.
Within fifteen minutes, it has eight hundred and seventy-three unread messages.

Narrator 2:
Thursday, the tenth of October, seven a.m.
Management announces a so-called “feature freeze.”
Seven oh-two – the first hotfix is released.
Seven fifteen – the second.
Eight o’clock – a developer installs a monitoring tool on his laptop, hoping to see the truth.
It is terrible.

Narrator 1:
Friday, the eleventh of October, eight a.m.
In a desperate attempt to save performance,
all services are switched to auto-scaling.
Moments later, cloud costs double to the GDP of Liechtenstein.

Nine fourteen – a data-stream truck crashes into the central message system.
The event queue grows to three million entries.
Someone tries to drain it manually – using Excel.

Narrator 2:
Saturday, the twelfth of October.
Tensions rise.
Developers, sysadmins, and product owners face each other, exhausted and confused.
One shouts “Rollback!”, another “Roll forward!” –
nobody knows what’s actually live anymore.

Ten thirty-seven – a customer reports through the helpdesk
that she just saw a blue screen inside the web portal.
Even though she’s using a browser.

Twelve o’clock –
for half an hour, systems have been attacking each other with endless retries.
Monitoring now only shows error code five hundred.
The database quietly sobs into its log.

Narrator 1:
Two thirty p.m.
The cloud is overloaded.
One cluster after another collapses.
Parts of the infrastructure are unreachable.

In the offices, developers and cloud engineers sit exhausted at their desks.
Some have fallen asleep – heads resting on keyboards.
Others stare silently at flickering monitors,
where only error messages remain.

A special task force of system engineers begins rescuing crashed containers.
In the hallways, tired people wander aimlessly.
People like you and me,
who only wanted to close one little ticket.

(Soft hum of servers. Music fades slowly into silence.)