fsck

fsck is a standard Unix and Linux utility whose name stands for file system check. It inspects a disk’s file system for structural problems—corrupted metadata, orphaned inodes, bad block references, inconsistent directory trees—and tries to repair what it can before you mount the volume again. You usually run it after an unclean shutdown (power loss, kernel panic, forced reset), when a drive throws I/O errors, or when the system refuses to mount a partition and tells you to check the disk first. On many systems the check runs automatically at boot if something looks wrong; you can also run it manually, often from a recovery environment or single-user mode, because checking a mounted root file system is unsafe. It is not a general “fix my computer” tool. It does not delete malware, tune performance, or recover deleted files. It is narrowly focused: verify and repair the on-disk structures that the operating system uses to store and find files. If the file system is healthy, fsck finishes quickly and changes little or nothing. If it finds damage, it may prompt you (or your admin) to approve fixes, rename recovered fragments to lost+found, or in bad cases leave the volume unmountable until more serious recovery work is done. The command is pronounced “eff-ess-see-kay.” It also happens to rhyme with a very common English expletive—one reason this site’s name lands the way it does. fsck The Machine is wordplay on that utility and on being terminated from MSFT: run a file system check on what happened, surface the corruption, and document what needs fixing.

What is this?

Well, it is a mini tell-all about my time at MSFT. Do I have a non-disparagement clause? Yes. Am I not expected to live a great many years- also yes. Are these clauses not enforceable against living spouses- sort of. But this is a memoir and I am telling things as they happened, which is not slander or libel or defamation- it is objective truth. So this is a memoir and a tell-all- combined. I will do my best to walk the legal line, but the gloves are off. However I won’t be revealing any corporate secrets. For instance, I’d love to tell the world that billions of dollars are strung together with shoestring and bubblegum, sweat, tears, and a collective metric ton of legally prescribed adderall- but that’s probably not a secret anyway.

Who am I?

Well, I’m not going to say, specifically- but I will tell you my story. The salient fact is that I have incurable cancer and I was recently terminated from MSFT while on leave for it. They decided I’d been on leave too long and I’d been “restructured” out of my role a while back (they love to do that by the way)- it’s not a firing, just a “while we’re at it” during the continual churn and burn of the ever-moving blob that is MSFT. I was born in the southwest to a teenage mom who was extremely young and given via private adoption to a couple with a young doctor and a speech pathologist. We lived there another couple of years before moving to the west coast where I grew up. It would take until I was 35 to learn that my biological father had a strong Jewish heritage, a strong background in racing (my biological parents literally met at the racetrack), a strong technological background, and that I would be pulled towards all of these things. Genetics are so much stronger than we ever realize.

The Yearbook

When I was a kid in elementary school, I wrote in my yearbook that my hero was Bill Gates. This remains true- he is a genuine philanthropist who actually reinvests in the world and understands that the world needs to continue beyond his lifespan and that some problems you can’t just dump money into. But the recent revelations of a certain island certainly have me questioning his character as a human- but unlike some of the others who may or may not have been to said island, they have not contributed nearly so much back to the world. I digress. The point is, when I was a kid, Bill Gates was my untainted hero. I aspired to work at MSFT. It was my penultimate goal in life. I would spend the next 30-some years in that quest.

Nerd

I grew up in the early 80s and being a computer “geek”/“nerd” was not exactly cool. I was an outcast and constantly made fun of. The “in” insult of the day was “gay”, regardless of whether you had a girlfriend or not. I had few friends, but my best friend was Jewish- purely by nature’s coincidence. I had no idea at that point anything about my biological family. I actually met my future Jewish wife at my best friend’s birthday party and we dated for a little while- but the timing for that wouldn’t be right for another 20 years either.

Awards and Accolades

I survived school by keeping my head down and focusing on what I loved- coding. I helped bring our town’s website onto the internet and had an award created at my junior high for bringing our town online. I also helped a number of teachers with their computers. My teachers were my friends. I received the American Legion Award for Service to my School, teachers, and community.

Speed

I would learn later that my adoptive father had sought this award specifically and I had no idea it existed until it was awarded to me. It was of little consolation for the torment I endured. Throughout my schooling years I was pushed against lockers, harassed, chased, groped- you name it. By junior high I was forever on a quest to be the fastest kid on wheels to escape my tormentors.

Attempted Murder

Of course, one day they disconnected my back brakes on my bike and I was doing close to 50mph down a hill and a parked car was in the bike lane, so I was forced into traffic, but the car did not realize how fast I was going and/or did not let me in. I applied my brakes and having only front brakes, flew over my handlebars and promptly slid many feet on my elbow and ground my arm down to the bone. One of the most painful injuries I’ve ever had. This was just one time they almost killed me. I kept riding after this though, it wasn’t enough to stop me, yet- that would come later. At this point I was in Tour de France shape.

Entrepreneur

Towards the end of Junior High/Middle School, I was running a “Bulletin Board System” or “BBS” as they called them back then- a precursor to the internet. I had become friends with a local Boy Scount and we had the collective idea to share a then very expensive internet connection- my thought was to get a bigger connection and share it with more people- a lot more people. I ventured that we should start an internet service provider. So at age 13 for me, we did. I can’t say a lot more about it or it will identify me beyond people that already know me.

A Simple Twist of Fate

One day on the way to high school, I was biking across a keep clear area and cars were stopped on either side of it for a red light. Before the keep clear, it was one lane. After, it branched into turn lanes. As I was going through the keep clear, someone came around on the outside, “going only 5mph” according to them. My right leg hit the bumper, I flew up the windshield, broke it with my backpack full of books, flew over the car and landed on my head, cracking my helmet. My bike went under the car and was mangled. I was taken by ambulance. They duct taped my head to a backboard and it was pulling at my skin as we moved. The ambulance tech was kind of a bitch- she was saying something like “you made me come scoop you up” just complaining about having to get me- treating me like the accident was my fault. At the time, everything seemed ok. I had a little glass in my back, but my helmet saved my life. It didn’t however save me from all of the cognitive effects. Up until this point I was a literal genius. This stupid accident beyond my control, brought on by a lifetime of being chased and abused, brought about the beginning of my cognitive decline. I’d had headaches before this accident, but after this I had migraines. It wasn’t just that though. Over the remaining years of my life I went from being Bill Gates smart to just average to kind of Rain Man savant with a peak in coding but a little below average on everything else. Being a doctors kid, I was back at school by 3rd period in time for Spanish class. I always remembered watching Ferris Beuller’s Day Off and feeling a special connection to the line “my eyes could be bleeding and I’d still have to go to school”… or whatever it was. But this accident, while it seemed like nothing at the time, this twist of fate changed everything. Others won’t understand what it is like to feel yourself slip away, to lose abilities— to see things you could do one day and look back and realize you could never do that now or not recognize code you wrote long ago like a foreign language. It slowed down everything I did and caused health challenges in college and ultimately caused me to not complete college. It set me back at least 10 years.

High School Drama

I wasn’t in the Drama club- I was on the other side. The A/V Club. I ran the lights and sound for rallies, assemblies, everything. There’s no excitement quite like running a 50 year old light board, and praying the sparks don’t jump out at you when you throw a dial. You could say it was an electric experience. One show I had to quietly run down the side of the audience and break the glass on a fire extinguisher at the back of the auditorium just to be safe because of some smoke from a dimmer- which I had to pull from duty immediately and work around, distributing the load on the fly to other dimmers and figuring out how to work it into other cues. Then there was the time I was up 20 some feet on a scaffolding trying to hang a can light. Did I mention there was no union? This was child labor in retrospect and super unsafe. They finally condemned that light board after our last production that year. What did I tell you about harassment pushing me into near death experiences?

Steely Dan the Fruit Ninja

Also around the end of Junior High while I was getting the ISP framework off the ground, I had the privelege of working for a steel processing plant. I wrote some software to calculate costs for cutting/slicing steel on a line which involved formulas for the density of steel times the length and such trying to achieve a maximum weight per cut for truck loading weight distribution. I was terrified for years they were going to call me some night and tell me it was off by a penny a foot or something and that I’d owe them millions. In hindsight I should have been afraid that it would give nonsense numbers for poundage/footage resulting in damage to vehicles or something. I am thankful for the real world experience I got on that job. I also learned a lot of impolite spanish- enough to know when people are cursing the boss man in slacks coming from the exec office. This was also an eye opening place in that it was quite obviously a place where great harm could come to you. Some was understatated- large drums of stored combustibles and lubricants,welding gasses, equipment and tanks, giant 60-80,000 pound coils of steel in the land of earth quakes, coils of strapping/banding, and on and on. But what will always stick with me was you knew you were in what I called “big-boy land” because on the machines weren’t the usual “do-not touch” with a simple hand with a line through it diagrams- these were hands with severed digits and blood dripping out. We were filming a safety video of what not to do. Putting bananas through pinch points and other fun stuff. On one of the lines that shoots out sheets of cut steel sort of overlapped on the edges a little bit as it goes away from the machine due to the fact that some of the belt has to stop during the cut. This actually happens very fast and sometimes, fairly rarely, a sheet of metal will launch out of the machine and not land nicely in its place. One is never to place ones head over the belt to look down the line in either direction or into the machine- with or without safety glasses- as the flying sheet of steel will cut your damn head in half like fscking fruit ninja. So of course, we film that no no (since it so rarely actually spits out like that) and a sheet flies just over our co-worker’s un-helmeted, un-protected in any-way-whatsoever, head. By an inch. Maybe. Filmed in HD. We couldn’t use it because OSHA would have our bosses heads.

To University, and Beyond

So, when the kids at school were calling me gay before- they were touching on something being off but just didn’t have the right vocabulary for it. See, what I was was transgender- though I like women so I’m technically the other kind of gay I guess. It seems like there are a lot of neurodivergent computer nerds who are trans or nonbinary? How is this applicable now? Well, when you’re trans and living in the house of people who chose you but have different expectations and standards and you’re fscking terrified of them- you tend to put distance between yourself and them. It doesn’t help that the UC system in California was overloaded and unless you had a 4.0 and were some sort of exceptional minority student, you couldn’t get in. So, when I was offered a scholarship out of state some 2,000 miles away- I took it. It was also close to where my grandmother grew up and I had always felt a very strong connection to her and thought I’d be bringing myself closer to her in sprit and sort of stupidly for the 2 days she brought herself back to that part of the country every summer- which only lasted a couple more years anyway, so I didn’t exactly get to spend more time with her by being there. She ended up dying mostly alone at 97. I was her special person and I let her down the last few years. I wish I’d never gone to college- at least not across the country. If I could do it over again, I’d have gone to community college close by- but in my family, not only did you go to college, you went to a “real one”. Quotes mine, but you get the emphasis. Staying close and at a community college would have changed so much. The university I went to was actually pretty great, but what sunk me was the math department- you never got taught by the actual professors, you not only got a TA but one who didn’t speak english as a first language and who couldn’t teach— who couldn’t distill. Anyone can stand in front of the class and point to paragraphs in the book and answer student questions “well this is like this” and just point at the paragraphs over and over and not add any new takes on anything. If you cant teach and you can’t communicate, you shouldn’t be- you know- teaching. This college had to have had the worst math department in the universe. I blame that college of math singly for ruining my chance at an engineering degree. Most of my classes were like that. I finally got one professor I liked who actually taught his own classes, and he had some kind of medical problem and was out for weeks so we had one substitute after another and no continuity class to class. 75% of the class got an F. I appealed to the dean but was rejected. After repeating 2 or 3 fscking hard math classes that depended on the previous class which was then now that much further back in recollection and my brain was decaying… I had to throw in the towel.

The Other Problem

When you rely on your parents for paying for your education and you’re also consciously putting distance between yourself and them… it is a hard line to toe. Eventually something had to give. It came about though, because of the woman who I met at a party (yes, nerdy me went to those and there was even beer present) who I ultimately fell in love with and spent 16 years with. She made me cookies to get to my heart which worked as expected. She had a rough home life and I called home upset a lot and my parents only ever heard the negatives about her so they formed a very negative impression of her. I would later tell my parents they were right about her, but not for 16 years. Life is funny that way. We had a complex relationship. There was genuine love. There was also some fire and contention. She didn’t know how not to be the squeaky wheel. I’m also pretty certain she had undiagnosed PMDD and bipolar- but one of her problems was her parents would use the medical establishment against her to have her doctors tell her what a bad girl she had been. She refused any and all medical treatment and this nearly cost our first son his life and it ultimately cost her her own. Our first son was born a month late with meconium and meningitis. He was very sick and spent a long while in the NICU. As for her, she ended up getting a GI adenocarcinoma that took her out in a matter of months. And I had cancer that whole time too… Like so many things, we just didn’t know it yet. I’m getting a little out of order though- just before she died my oldest son told a therapist she was emotionally abusive and he was obligated to report it though he told me he personally didn’t want to. DHS came and talked to all of us and decided that as long as I kept them separate while she died that everything was well and good and they’d close the case. They were over and out. I had no idea anything was going on while I was working. She was a hardass and I knew that much, but what I had witnessed didnt stack up to abuse. I still don’t know if our son was telling tall tales as he had a tendency to do, or if there was more to it. I may never know. She passed uneventfully a matter of weeks later. Case closed. Although we were together 16 years, we were never officially married.

Lost Love

I mentioned a birthday party and meeting my future wife. This is it. A while back when I had gotten sick, I had sought out my biological family and my biological dad had sent me a picture of multiple generations the family. My great grandmother reminded me of the girl from the birthday party. After my kids mom died, I reached out. I had trouble with being alone, and something in the universe just drove me to do it. I was suddenly a single parent and I needed help. I knew deep down she was the right person to help. We started talking on zoom and reconnected like no time had passed. She had moved from our childhood town up to Washington- “coincidentally” a place my adoptive sister had lived for a while and I’d grown extremely fond of and decided that’s where I wanted to retire. After a while she agreed to come to the midwest to visit for a test run, and it went swimmingly. We hit it off and it was meant to be. She returned to Washington for a while, but soon decided she would come stay for a few months to “rescue” me from the midwest and bring me to Washington where I knew was my destiny.

Initial Kidnapping

We didn’t know yet that I had cancer and I started having an insane headache that lasted many weeks and was at a 7-8/10 pain constantly. I needed to go to a hospital for a couple days to deal with it and I had two kids that needed care. I didn’t trust my immediate family and called a cousin. She came and was incredibly unhelpful. She was appalled by the scattered toys and such in the house and refused to stay in the house, so we had to get her a hotel. We should have known something was afoul. She wanted to take our sons to Colorado for a couple weeks rather than let me go to the hospital for a couple days. We had a bad feeling about it, but couldn’t put our finger on it. But I needed to deal with it, and we had little choice, so we let her. That was the last time we saw them. Eight years ago and counting as of 2026.

Legal Kidnapping

My adoptive sister “graciously” offered to help out and take care of our boys while I went to the Diamond headache clinic in Chicago for a couple weeks. We know now that my family perceived the DCFS case as unresolved and hanging over our heads and that somehow they were going to swoop in and take the kids which was absolutely not going to happen. The perception of our place being a “disaster” (it was just cluttered with toys, you know a 3 year old’s domain) from my cousin’s report somehow triggered a full scale alarm. I was not given any benefit of the doubt and my adoptive (eg no blood relation) family started legal proceedings to get permanent guardianship of my biological children, all while stringing me along with false promises- do this and get to Seattle and you’ll get your kids back. All bullfsck. My adoptive family has a lot of money and “standing” so I suspect the judge was “rather favorable” to them. I was told to “shut up” and listen to the verdict and not allowed to defend myself. I lost all rights to the kids and have not talked to them since. Complete bullfsck. Needless to say relations with my “family” are rather strained since.

Seattle

After losing the kids, we sold the house and ejected most of our belongings and hurried ourselves to Seattle as part of the carrot and stick charade lead by my “family”. We barely brought anything, might as well have had a housefire in the midwest. We took a bloodbath on the house sale. Our realtor screwed us too. It seemed like everyone who was supposed to help us just took their pound of flesh and took advantage of us. We were advised to make various repairs with a trusted contractor and spent thousands and ultimately the value of the house was not changed and the house did not sell for almost a year. We left it behind and were in Seattle for months before it sold.

MSFT

First, a note— I met a miracle man who mentored me and got me the job at MSFT. Without him, I would never have survived my the last few years, gotten my cancer surgeries, etc. And I should add that the benefits at MSFT are unparalleled. They have gotten my wife and I through hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical interventions over the last few years. Having finally arrived in Washington, I was hired at MSFT the start of the pandemic as a mostly remote employee, onboarded while they were figuring out how to deal with mostly remote people. I even helped figure out some of the technical protocols for switching the computer domains around. I can’t tell you what team I worked on because that would instantly identify me to MSFT. I’m also going to preface what I’m about to tell you by saying I have friends I went to high school with who went to Amazon and Apple and I’ve heard similar stories there- so this is more about being a cog in the machine than MSFT itself- but my frustration is in how the American system failed me personally- and how it was 100% on MSFT to support me. We’re so set up to rely on insurance, but then they have to terminate me and rip the insurance out from under my feet. How am I supposed to ride out the rest of my days with this cancer? It’s not treatable but there are still things we need to do to alleviate suffering. I can tell you that most of the tech world is chaos in the strictest sense- pure entropy. Rapid evolution at all costs forced by the shareholders and a constant need for growth growth growth, quarter after quarter. Companies used to have long term visions, but now we seem to be in these very near term patterns. My time at MSFT was absolutely no different. It took some of the absolute brightest people I ever met and had them massively burned out. Top percent people on this planet and they were barely handling the stress. These are code fighter pilots flying billion dollar jets and they know it. The slightest error can cause millions of dollars of damage and hours or weeks of mop up and customer image issues. An errant decimal point or keystroke could jam up the works. Tuttle/Buttle. I don’t have total solutions to any of this, but my observation is that these fighter pilots need mandatory routine therapy, better peer support, better pay, a union, and qualified immunity type exemptions and protections for their actions on the job that protect them from damages resulting from good faith efforts to code solutions.

A Cancer

I started to have long term migraines, extreme fatigue, and profuse sweating. I went on leave a while, but cratering finances pushed me to claw my way back to work. I made it a matter of a few more months before my body just couldn’t take it and went back out on leave. Shortly after I was diagnosed with metastatic papillary thyroid cancer. In the coming months we’d do a 9.5 hour massive radical neck dissection and radioactive iodine. If you haven’t listened to “Puma” by Andrew Bird, you need to do that right now. At initial diagnosis/biopsy they discovered I’d had Hashimoto’s as well. In the year after that we’d do more radioiodine scans and eventually a PET scan and confirm that my cancer is incurable iodine refractory/resistant and do a second radical neck dissection. We also determined that this cancer had been present on scans back to 2016! So I’d had cancer all while my first partner did, and it was what had caused my headaches - and the loss of my children. Still, my “family” did not change course or issue any apologies or talk to me or show any sign of compassion whatsoever. Why fscking adopt someone if you’re just going to ditch them when the going gets tough and they get fscking cancer?

Reorganization

At some point during my leave, my department and several others was “reorganized”, which is a perpetual thing that happens at MSFT. But the other thing is they love to make use of the reorganization as a way to dismiss people with a plausible excuse. So they made my role obsolete. I can’t tell you much more about what happened or it will pin me down and lose me my severance, but it was wholly obvious to me that I was “reorganized” out of a job and while on leave I saw it happen to a few other colleagues in other departments. So now I was an employee who had been terminated and if I “returned to work”, the termination would become effective and I’d receive a severance at that point. But I was still on leave and had all of my benefits, insurance, etc. Thank God- The Machine was still working for me, sort of.

Leave

I spent a couple years on leave- and this is no picnic. It is a parade of endless doctors appointments, and of insurance companies forever assuming you’ll be better in a week or two (even with incurable disease) and withholding your LTD payout until your upcoming doctors appointment. It is hard to pay bills if you don’t know whether they’re going to continue supporting your case or pay you on time. Prudential is absolutely horrible about this. At best we’d negotiate a few months of runway at a time, but it always felt like a looming axe. After a couple years of leave, MSFT decided that I’d been riding on their coat tails a little too long. I got a phone call that they were terminating me from leave which would end my benefits (and health insurance). They’d pay six months of COBRA and I believe I can extend it another 6 months after that but I can’t afford to. The money I make from the LTD every month disqualifies us from almost all financial assistance, but between our rent, astronomical medical and other resultant debt, and the utilities are through the roof as well- we’re drowning financially despite what looks on paper to be a healthy sustaining income we should be grateful for.

fsck The Machine

That brings us to today. The machine chewed me up and spit me out and put me into all of the loopholes that are the cop-outs that protect corporate America. Further, The Machine failed to protect my children from my so called “family” which have no biological connection whatsoever and I wholeheartedly believe money was a large factor in the decision. Capitalism is being taken too far. We are killing people. The other two countries on this continent now have free medical care, Mexico and Canada. Why is “The Land of the Free” so chain-bound to the dollar and corporate interests?