Iris

I’ve always lived in the overlap between circuits and sonnets. Some people hear server fans whirring; I hear the heavy breathing of a tired machine. A 404 isn’t a failure to me—it’s digital ghosting. My brain just refuses to keep engineering and poetry in separate folders.

I realized I was different during a major system outage. The server room was pure panic. I looked at the logs and whispered, “The database is lonely; it’s sighing beneath ungrateful queries.” The CTO stared at me, then realized I was right about the load balancing. We fixed it. I became the unofficial bard of the IT department.

I blame my parents. Dad fixed things with spanners; Mum fixed things with metaphors. When the toaster broke, I’d take it apart while Mum narrated it like a tragic Victorian romance. Somewhere between the crumbs and the copper, I learned that machines have moods. You just have to know their language.

These days, my toolkit is half hardware, half imagery. A reboot is “a sunrise made of code.” A corrupted drive is “amnesia in metal.” Network latency is just “time holding its breath.” People roll their eyes, but they also screenshot my tickets because I make the terrifying technical stuff feel human.

It’s not whimsy; it’s translation. Machines operate on logic; people operate on feelings. I just introduce them to each other.

I don’t just fix what’s broken—I remind the machine what it was dreaming of being in the first place.