Merry Christmas fellow Central PA Technologists!

I know exactly where you are right now.

Statistically speaking, you are likely wedged between a pile of wrapping paper and an aunt you haven’t seen since 2019. You are holding a paper plate that is slowly losing structural integrity under the weight of too much ham. The ambient noise floor of the room has breached 85 decibels, a cacophony of overlapping conversations, a blaring television, and the shrieks of children fueled by unchecked sugar consumption.

And then, it happens.

The vibration in your pocket isn’t PagerDuty. It’s worse. Someone taps you on the shoulder.

"Hey, since you’re here... my printer has been making this weird noise."

Or maybe it’s: "You know about computers, right? What is this 'Bit-corn' thing, and should I buy it?"

I can see the "Check Engine" light flickering behind your eyes. Your internal fans are spinning at max RPM, but the heat isn’t dissipating. You are experiencing thermal throttling in real-time. You love these people—you really do—but right now, your social battery isn't just low; it’s in critical failure. You are looking for an exit vector. The bathroom? The basement? A sudden, inexplicable need to check the tire pressure on your car in the freezing cold?

I want you to know something, and I want you to hear it clearly amidst the chaos: It is okay to hide in the garage.

Today, we need to talk about "Peopling" not as a social obligation, but as a system resource issue. We need to diagnose why the holidays feel less like a vacation and more like a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on your nervous system. And most importantly, we need to grant you the administrative privileges to initiate a temporary shutdown.

In our professional lives, we obsess over system architecture. We build load balancers to distribute traffic. We set up auto-scaling groups to handle spikes in demand. We engineer resilience because we know that no server can handle infinite concurrent connections without eventually crashing.

Yet, when it comes to our own "Human API," we pretend we have infinite bandwidth.

A family gathering is, by definition, a DDoS attack. You are the server. Every relative, every question, every sensory input is a request packet.

When a server gets overwhelmed by requests, it starts dropping packets. It creates latency. Eventually, it times out. When a human gets overwhelmed, we get irritable. We dissociate. We stare blankly at the TV. We snap at people we love.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a hardware limitation. You are wired for "Deep Work"—long periods of focused, single-threaded processing. The holidays are the ultimate "Shallow Work" environment—a chaotic storm of interrupts and context switches.

Let’s address the elephant in the living room: The expectation that because you work in "tech," you are the on-call IT department for the extended lineage of your family.

There is a profound irony in the holidays. You spend 50 weeks a year translating complex business requirements into code, fighting with legacy systems, and managing intricate cloud infrastructures. You look forward to this break as a time to disconnect.

But to your family, your presence is a feature update.

"While you're here, can you look at the Wi-Fi?" "My iPad is stuck." "I forgot my password to the email."

Suddenly, you are working. You are debugging a router that hasn't had a firmware update since the Obama administration, kneeling on a dusty carpet while someone hovers over you asking, "Is it fixed yet?"

This creates resentment. It feels extractive. It violates the unwritten Service Level Agreement (SLA) of a holiday: Rest.

You need to understand that declining these requests, or deferring them, is not an act of hostility. It is an act of self-preservation. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and you certainly cannot debug a subnet mask when your brain is running on eggnog and exhaustion.

In the 717, we pride ourselves on a solid work ethic. We show up. But we often confuse "endurance" with "health." We think that if we just grit our teeth and smile through the fourth hour of political debate at the dinner table, we are being "good."

But look at the data. What happens when you return to work on January 2nd? If you haven't rested—truly rested—you start the new year with technical debt in your own brain. You are burnt out before the first stand-up meeting occurs.

"Social Recovery" is a hard skill. It is the deliberate practice of stepping away to clear the cache. It is recognizing the biological signals of overstimulation—the tightness in the chest, the inability to focus, the urge to flee—and acting on them before the crash occurs.

It is the equivalent of a "Graceful Restart" rather than a "Hard Crash."

So, how do we survive the rest of today?

We stop trying to be the "Always On" high-availability cluster. We accept that we are single-node instances that require maintenance windows.

We cannot change our families. We cannot patch the operating system of a holiday gathering to make it quieter or more efficient. But we can update our own firmware to handle the load better.

You are allowed to step away. You are allowed to not fix the printer today. You are allowed to sit in a quiet room and stare at your phone for 20 minutes just to feel the sweet, silent hum of zero packet loss.

To help you navigate this tactical operation, I’ve put together a special edition of our field guide. It’s not for a coffee shop this time. It’s for the house you’re standing in right now.

Take a breath. Reboot. And if anyone asks, tell them you’re running a critical system update.

Yours in code and chaos,

Don

Navigating the holiday chaos requires a map. I’ve scouted the terrain for you.

Now, we need to leverage the One-Pager strategy. I know the anxiety of trying to escape a conversation without seeming rude. You’re wondering, "How do I walk away from Uncle Bob without causing a scene?".

I’ve handled that heavy lifting for you. I’ve scouted the terrain and created the Sanctuary Field Guide. If you are a subscriber you can download it below to find the best hiding spots and the verbatim scripts you need to escape the "Why are you still single?" conversation. If you aren’t a subscriber, join the tribe. It is free:

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