The Data Horror Picture Show
Van Helsing will need a 6-week bootcamp to face these villains
A visitor, hmm? You seek knowledge of the dark ones? Ooh, yes, yes, knowledge I can give you, although you may find it does little to speed your decision making.
Yes, yes, come, quickly now… down these stairs… duck your head… a little further… ah, we are here. BUT BEWARE! You may live to regret this query! Or you may not live at all!!! Ha, haha. HAHAHA.
Submerged in the inky morass of server processes, under the flotsam of prep pipelines and proprietary data formats, beneath the jetsam of ad hoc level of detail calculations and data extracts, something sinister waits.
Legend says it is a reptilian abomination — half custom SQL, half direct API integrations. But this is hearsay. No eyewitness of the creature has ever surfaced — alive, at least. Some report spooky sounds at midnight: schlepp-schlepping footsteps, suspicious splashes. Others hear melodic croaking, story-like melodies, tantalizing and terrifying all at once.
Only the numbers don’t lie: no ambitious white collar employee who spends the night near these waters is seen again. Eager analysts, doe-eyed product managers, fresh executives — no one knows exactly how, but all know that they will become one more piece of detritus, floating silently in the black waters.
BEHOLD! THE CREATURE FROM THE TAB LEAUGOON! DESPAIR, YE WHO ENTER HIS WATERY REALM!
The HMS Guido has executed this run dozens of times. The captain enjoys these relay jobs: fetch data from the Warehouse Isles, deliver it for processing to Cape Sagemaker, and return the goods by nightfall. Today, with fair winds and clear skies, the captain thinks he might even make it home for dinner.
Then, from the crow’s nest, a shout: an unknown flag in the distance. Not the blue and yellow of the twin snakes — no, this flag is black as night. Word spreads, the crew ceases to row. They begin to shiver. The winds change direction.
The captain knows what this means: statisticians.
He runs to and fro, urging bravery, urging his crew to row, faster, but lo, the assailants fly on the water, faster than any ship in Her Majesty’s tightly regulated armada. As it draws close, the captain can’t help but admire it: it is shiny, brilliant in the sun. Its deck is tidy. The flag is crisp, simple, terrifying. A single letter, adorned with skulls and bones.
Then there are cries: “Power! Significance! HETEROSCHEDASTICITY!” And they are on the ship, sinking their instruments of death into his men, mutilating bodies with time-honed methods. There is screaming. The captain jumps overboard, and the last sound he hears before plunging into the icy sea is an animal growl: Arrrrrr!
BEHOLD! THE DREAD R-ATE ROBERTS! PREPARE TO BE BOARDED!
The sun sets while the mad doctor hunts for one last artifact. A reference table, a link between territory goals and sales opportunities. The final link.
The scientist finds it. A custom object in the bowels of Salesforce. It is rotting, festering, untouched for years — but it is there. Ha. He exports it as a CSV. Haha. Once this was forgotten, and now, no one will forget it. Just like no one will forget the doctor’s name, not after tonight!
He races back to the lab. A massive body lays strapped to a table. With VBA, he stitches the new table on, connecting left arm to left shoulder. Then, he steps back and admires the work of his mind, even as it repulses his body. He caresses the lifeless carcass.
The moment is here. Lightning flashes. Thunder rolls. With two bands he throws the lever. Zap!
The body shivers, a groan emanates. The text “refreshing data” appears on the creature’s forehead. A spinning wheel. Refreshing. Refreshing.
Nnngh, it moans. The booooard...
Overjoyed, the madman shouts, I am your father! And you are my child, the child of Viktor Finankenstein!
Booooard… it moans again. Find… the board…nnngh….
Concern breaks across the scientist’s brow. No, rest, my child. Rest. You are not ready. There will be time to meet them, to show them your power. Not tonight.
Shackles break. The board… I must tell the board…
The doctor grabs him, but he is weak. The creature is too strong. The monster stands, throws his creator to the ground. The board! They will see these numbers, share them, fear them!
The scientist weeps as his creation escapes the lab. Just once! Let me check you just once! But the creature is gone, to what ends, good or evil, the doctor cannot say.
BEHOLD! FINANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER! HE DARES YE TO VLOOKUP!
Ozzy Mandias, ShipCo’s new CEO, has a nickname: the Nemean Lion. His methods are vicious, his hide impenetrable, his results unquestionable.
That’s why Jacob Jacobson, director of business intelligence, is excited to meet with him today. ShipCo has many problems, and Jacobson knows them all. In fact, he has measured them all. And finally, here is a partner who can act on this knowledge, rather than burying his head in the sand. The Nemean lion!
As he arrives at the executive suite, he finds the secretary is placing a garbage bag down a new chute. She glances at him suspiciously, then checks the schedule. “Mr. Mandias will see you now.”
He enters confidently. “Welcome to the team, Mr. Mandias!”
“Spare the niceties,” comes a cold reply. Mr. Mandias spins around in his high-backed chair. “These numbers are wrong.”
“Oh, uh, well, I don’t think so. We, uh, haven’t changed the pipelines in months. How do you mean, they’re wrong?”
Mandias stands up and walks around the desk. Jacobson notices, now, some new features in the room: a gallery of swords, a new fireplace. Heat. Why is it so hot in here?
“Profit is going down. Profit should not be going down.” Mandias picks one of the blades off the wall. It is very sharp. Jacobson hears a click behind him, near the door.
“Well, sure, yes, that’s what I was hoping to talk to you about. You see, our analyses show that, uh, there are some opportunities for us to, er, trim some fat — what are you doing? That thing is sharp!”
“Jacob, Jacob… mind if I call you Jake? You see it all, but you don’t understand. A numbers guy.” He presses the blade against Jacobson’s abdomen. “There are no numbers guys here anymore. You report it, you own it.”
Jacobson hears a shing, and feels heat, so much heat, right at his heels. “So you own these numbers, and they’re off, and it’s not okay.” Jacobson nods. Steps back a bit, away from the sword.
“You’re going to give that message to your team. Not directly. But clearly. Do you understand?” Mandias steps forward, closer, closer, pushing “Jake” backwards.
Then Jacobson understands. It is, in fact, the very last thing he understands.
BEHOLD! THE CHIEF EXECUTION OFFICER! CONSUMER OF NUMBERS, CONSUMER OF SOULS!
Kids are resilient. Your wife is strong. This only happens four times a year.
These are your thoughts, as you crouch in the corner of your cabin, clutching your rifle. Your family is locked in the cellar, eat canned ravioli, shivering behind seven layers of concrete.
The evening is sticky and silent. The moon comes up — it’s a full quarter moon, the first in three months. Then you hear them.
“Who? Who? WHOOOOOO HAS THE NUMBERS….?”
You know that voice. It’s Tammy, the product manager for Search. But it’s also not Tammy. Tammy is genial, kind, patient. This voice is voracious, vicious, ragged. You can hear the lust in her voice. Lust for meat, lust for metrics,
Your meat, your metrics.
“WheeeeEEEEEeeeere is the dashboard?” That was Matt in marketing ops.
Nine hours. One night. You can do this.
You check your gear: silver bullets, silver hatchet, silver dagger. A copy of your first pass at the quarterly numbers, printed on silver — you don’t yet have today’s numbers, but the beasts can be tricked sometimes. The metal cost you dearly, but this is the price for living in Analyst’s Hollow.
Sniff-sniff. Click-clack. Tammy is here. You turn off your safety. Eight hours and fifty-five minutes left.
BEHOLD! THE WHEREWOLF! THE HUNTED BECOMES THE HUNTER!
The new data engineer seemed normal enough during the interviews, but things have been getting weird lately.
First you noticed the perplexing Slack statuses, like “🦑 😴 — R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn”. Some inside joke from his old company, you guess.
But his JIRA tickets were off too: [DE-666] Sacrifice dbt project to New Data Platform (8 points). Probably the new agile mesh framework you hadn’t caught up on yet, you tell yourself.
But now, it’s time for a chat. Last night’s scheduled migration to the new infra went great, according to his report. But users have been reporting degraded experiences all morning — missing data, broken dashboards, inexplicable urges to murder their colleagues.
You set up a Zoom call, and he joins. But confound it, he’s left his camera off, and all you can hear is gurgling. Typical. A data engineer that can’t manage Zoom.
But wait — the feed is normal, it’s just dark. And the noises are… intelligent. You see eyes, faintly.
Then your camera turns off. The whole screen goes black. A message appears: Registering Node… Your vision goes dark. Then, in monospaced font drawn directly on your retina, you see: Evicting Pod; Deploying Agent…
Now you understand. Your engineer had not stood anything up. There was no Terraform plan. This new data platform was summoned. And it would consume everything, the stack, the data, the engineers, the business, the world. This was His Platform.
BEHOLD! THE GLORIOUS KUBETHULHU! ALL SUBMIT TO HIS POWER!
You wake, groggily, from a dream. In that dream you were nuzzling a beautiful man. His neck was freshly shaven, warm, cozy. It had been dark and humid, a summer night on the veranda. Crickets chirping, the music of the stars playing overhead. A voluptuous moon.
You had asked him, convincingly, for information. His core entities. His change logs. His API keys. He gave them willingly, eagerly, and you siphoned them out slowly, sensually. This is partnership. He is a partner, a willing partner.
But now you are here, and it is hot, too hot, much too hot. Why does it smell like garlic? What is that sound — yelling? Who is here? What time is it?
Clunk, they’re at the door. They’re right above you. Clunk, a crack of light. Not sunlight, firelight. Clunk. A ring forms now. The stench of garlic is awful, you recoil as it filters in.
The door flies open and you are bathed in light. Looking up you squint, all you can make it is shadows. Yelling. Garlic, why all this garlic?
And then you see it — the stake. Held aloft. Not your partners, no, they lie beside you in timber beds, coming to the same realization. No, these are their loved ones, the locals, the fearful ones. As the stake is hammered down, again and again, you scream. They never understood you, and now they never will.
BEHOLD! FOR YOU ARE THE MONSTER! THE STAKE-HOLDERS COME FOR JUSTICE! TURN BACK, O CREATURE OF NUMBERS, OR FACE THEIR WRATH!!!
The illustrations are horrifyingly beautiful - are you doing them yourself Stephen?