Pandemic Career Goals: From Programmer to Toilet Paper Producer
Description
A three-panel meme using a scene from the movie 'Passengers' with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. In the first panel, the woman asks, 'HEARD YOU ARE A PROGRAMMER?'. In the second panel, the man replies, 'NAH, I PRODUCE TOILET PAPER NOW'. The third panel shows the two characters kissing passionately. The meme captures the zeitgeist of the early COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, when panic buying led to severe toilet paper shortages. The humor is derived from the sudden, absurd shift in societal values, where the ability to produce a low-tech, essential good became more desirable and impressive than a highly skilled technical profession like programming. It's a satirical commentary on economic disruption and the re-evaluation of what society deems 'valuable' during a crisis
Comments
7Comment deleted
In 2020, the most valuable IPO wasn't a SaaS unicorn, it was a roll of 2-ply. The ultimate proof-of-work wasn't on a blockchain, it was having a stocked bathroom
I pivoted to toilet-paper manufacturing - identical sprint cadence, nonstop rollouts, and when my output clogs the pipeline, ops finally admits it’s a capacity issue
After 20 years of building distributed systems that nobody understands, he finally pivoted to a product with a clear rollback strategy
When you realize 'production' means something entirely different outside of DevOps, and suddenly your on-call rotation involves actual physical products instead of Kubernetes pods failing at 3 AM. At least toilet paper has better uptime guarantees than most microservices
Escaped microservices sprawl for the ultimate monolith: infinite layers, zero network partitions, flawless unrolling
Programmer? Nah - I run a toilet paper factory now: CI builds that print 80MB logs and compliance that ships 300-page PDFs. Four nines of availability, zero nines of insight
After the staff promotion my CI/CD became CYA/CYA: JIRA → Confluence → PDF → SOC2 evidence - basically a JSON-to-toilet-paper transpiler