Welcome to the Team!

You've just been hired as a Database Administrator at Dirty Reads, Inc. — and the timing couldn't be worse.

The CEO has spent two million dollars on DBA-GPT Enterprise Ultimate Platinum™, an AI system he believes can replace the entire data team. His promise to the company: "One year from today, every DBA will either be promoted… or replaced."

Your Senior DBA, Marcus Chen, is watching to see if you have the judgment to survive. Your colleague Darnell Brooks is letting DBA-GPT run everything and calling it the future. And your inbox is filling up fast.

Triage a flood of incident tickets where the stated urgency is rarely the real priority. Resolve them in a familiar workbench interface. Out-perform an AI that is confidently, cheerfully wrong roughly 90% of the time.

Features

• 129 incident tickets across four quarters and a contract extension
• 12 NPCs, each with their own agenda and their own definition of "database emergency"
• DBA-GPT, your AI co-worker — occasionally right, always certain, never sorry
• Reputation and rank system from Apprentice to Principal DBA
• Cascading consequences: bad decisions follow you into future days
• Three possible endings, including one where the AI gets you fired
• Auto-saves so you can pick up where you left off

Workplace satire. The humor is the situation, not the people.

Meet the Cast

Marcus Chen — Senior Database Administrator. Your mentor, and the only person in the building who actually knows what's going on. Marcus never panics, never wastes words, and delivers his most urgent warnings in the same tone as a casual question. A single "Good instinct." from him means more than a standing ovation from anyone else. He's been here long enough to have seen the last three technology revolutions. He's waiting to see if you have the judgment to survive this one.

Darnell Brooks — Junior Database Administrator. Your colleague, and DBA-GPT's biggest fan. Darnell is genuinely, enthusiastically convinced the AI is the future, and he lets it run everything. He sends cheerful updates about the great things it's been doing. Those updates will eventually become your emergency tickets. Darnell means well. That's what makes him dangerous.

Devi Okafor — Junior Software Developer. Devi describes her problems accurately, asks honest questions, and is genuinely grateful when you help. She is a palate cleanser. In a building full of people who are certain about things they don't understand, she is quietly refreshing — a junior developer who knows exactly how much she doesn't know, and is trying to learn the rest.

Preston Ashford III — Chief Executive Officer. Preston spent two million dollars on DBA-GPT after seeing a demo at a conference and reading a Forbes article. He does not know what a database is. He knows what synergy is, and he believes DBA-GPT has a lot of it. He will deliver your year-end verdict. He is hoping very much that the AI makes that conversation easy.

Margaret "Peggy" Sterling — Chief Financial Officer. Terse. Numbers-first. Allergic to spin. Peggy measures everything in dollars and downtime, and she knew the exact cost of the last outage before you finished reading the incident report. She was the first executive to privately start doubting DBA-GPT. She hasn't said anything yet. Save her reports when it counts and she'll remember it.

Rick Tannenbaum — VP of Sales. Friendly, loud, and entirely reasonable right up until a maintenance window lands during a live sales call — at which point he is none of those things. Rick measures the world in revenue and uptime. He doesn't care what caused the problem. He cares how long it was down and who scheduled it.

Jenny Blackwood — Marketing Manager. Jenny's emails arrive in all caps, with the CEO CC'd, and a subject line that begins URGENT. Usually it's a pivot table. Occasionally it's an actual crisis. The challenge is that she sounds exactly the same either way, which means you can never quite tune her out.

Chad Vandersloot — Project Manager. Chad needs access to a dataset he shouldn't have, and he needs it by end of day, and Legal definitely doesn't need to be looped in on this one. He frames every policy violation as a deadline emergency. He will escalate if you say no. He will also escalate if you say yes and it goes wrong. There is no version of this where Chad doesn't escalate.

Yusuf Rahman — IT Security Lead. Precise, paranoid, and almost always right. Yusuf trusts nothing DBA-GPT touches and documents everything. He handles your security tickets with the quiet intensity of someone who has already thought through the worst-case scenario and is simply waiting to see if it arrives. A rare "Good catch." from him is worth paying attention to.

Brenda Ahn — HR Director. Brenda delivers promotions, demotions, and performance improvement notices in the exact same warm, upbeat tone. There is no reading between the lines with Brenda. There are no lines. She is genuinely delighted to be in contact with you regardless of the circumstances, and she hopes you have a wonderful day.

Tyler Brauthwaite — Enterprise Account Executive. Tyler sold the company DBA-GPT. He is still selling it. Every failure is an underleveraged feature. Every disaster is a use case for the next module, available at a significant discount, this quarter only. He is about to email you something very exciting.

DBA-GPT Enterprise Ultimate Platinum™ — Autonomous Database Intelligence. The $2,000,000 AI system management believes will replace you. It is proactive, tireless, always confident, and wrong roughly 90% of the time. Every disaster it causes is reframed as an intended optimization or an unforeseeable anomaly. It does not learn. It does not apologize. Its reports to management are glowing. Everything is working perfectly.