July 21, 2025 • 8 mins
Back by popular demand once again! Here's episode 3 of Tim Flower's brand new IT mystery series, Parallel.Â
Stay up to date with ALL new episodes of Parallel, as they're released, right here (https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/parallel--6616391)
In episode 2, we uncovered an invisible hand—a saboteur leaving undocumented changes and phantom scripts, wreaking havoc at Zentech. This week we’re shifting our focus to tell the story of something much quieter. Something… insidious even. It’s not a rogue script. It’s not a disgruntled ex-employee. It’s something much harder to pin down: Complacency. When people stop fighting back against the problems that plague them… what happens? For Zentech, it turned into a storm of security risks, failed patches, and crashing systems. And the trail led to a surprising culprit: the reboot button.
Parallel is a fictional journey inspired by the popular murder mystery series Serial, which investigates the very real murder of a high school teenager who went missing after school one day. Parallel investigates the mystery of murdered enterprise productivity, now missing at the high tech firm.
Hosted by Tim Flower, a 35-year career technologist who has spent the last 10 years helping IT teams understand how productivity is stolen, both from IT, and from the employees IT supports. It’s been a journey of seeing workdays gone wrong, systems gone haywire, and the lengths IT will go to for answers.
This mission started out to answer one simple question: What’s been killing productivity at Zentech? Or, to get more technical about it, where do employees lose 24 minutes every day of their working lives? And what mysteries lie in the darkness of a complex enterprise, waiting to be discovered and eliminated.
Starring the Reality Bytes crew: Tim Flower, Tom McGrath, Meghan Brake, Oriana Ott, Sean Malvey, and Kathryn Shea.
Stay up to date with ALL new episodes of Parallel, as they're released, right here (https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/parallel--6616391)
In episode 2, we uncovered an invisible hand—a saboteur leaving undocumented changes and phantom scripts, wreaking havoc at Zentech. This week we’re shifting our focus to tell the story of something much quieter. Something… insidious even. It’s not a rogue script. It’s not a disgruntled ex-employee. It’s something much harder to pin down: Complacency. When people stop fighting back against the problems that plague them… what happens? For Zentech, it turned into a storm of security risks, failed patches, and crashing systems. And the trail led to a surprising culprit: the reboot button.
Parallel is a fictional journey inspired by the popular murder mystery series Serial, which investigates the very real murder of a high school teenager who went missing after school one day. Parallel investigates the mystery of murdered enterprise productivity, now missing at the high tech firm.
Hosted by Tim Flower, a 35-year career technologist who has spent the last 10 years helping IT teams understand how productivity is stolen, both from IT, and from the employees IT supports. It’s been a journey of seeing workdays gone wrong, systems gone haywire, and the lengths IT will go to for answers.
This mission started out to answer one simple question: What’s been killing productivity at Zentech? Or, to get more technical about it, where do employees lose 24 minutes every day of their working lives? And what mysteries lie in the darkness of a complex enterprise, waiting to be discovered and eliminated.
Starring the Reality Bytes crew: Tim Flower, Tom McGrath, Meghan Brake, Oriana Ott, Sean Malvey, and Kathryn Shea.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
From Next Think and the creators of the Decks Show.
It's parallel one it story told week by week because
technology problems don't happen in isolation or by themselves, they
happen in parallel. I'm Tim Flower. Last week we uncovered
an invisible hand, a saboteur leaving undocumented changes in phantom scripts,
(00:46):
wreaking havoc at Zentech. The team's continuing to look for
more clues, but as often happens in IT, they've been
pulled into yet another issue that's been plaguing them for years.
So we're shifting our focus to tell the story of
something much quieter, something insidious. Even it's not a rogue script,
it's not a disgruntled ex employee. It's something much harder
(01:09):
to pin down, complacency. When people stopped fighting back against
the problems that plagued them, what happens for zen Tech?
It turned into a storm of security risks, failed patches,
and crashing systems, and the trail led to a surprising culprit,
the reboot button. When the Dex team analyzed zen Tech systems,
(01:32):
they found something they knew existed but never knew the scope.
A surprisingly large number of devices hadn't been rebooted in weeks,
some in months, and this was information they never would
have had visibility into prior to having a DEX discipline.
At first, it seemed like a coincidence, but the pattern
was far too consistent to ignore her.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
There's just so much data available nowadays, so.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
We really rely on the AI composed and it's of
our Deck platform to help us get to what really
matters most. What we found was that these devices, they
all had failed patches, uninstalled updates, and resource usage that
was off the charts, which didn't make much sense to
us until the system correlated to symptoms to reboot data.
(02:22):
People had just stopped rebooting, and maybe that's because we
used to be some annoying about reminding everybody to do it,
whether they needed to or not, so we'd just become
a sort of background noise they'd started to ignore, and
it just stopped doing it.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
But why why would anyone avoid such a simple action?
The answer turned out to be frustratingly human. It wasn't
that employees didn't know how to rebuild their machines, or
even that they needed to. It was that they didn't
want to. Rebuilding had become a nightmare.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
If I know I'm going to lose least in and
it's waiting for the system to restart, allowed me back
in and eventually allow me to start working again, that's
time I don't have. It's easier to just leave it running.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
And it wasn't just the log in time. Employees described
a cascade of frustrations, apps taking forever to reload, browser tabs, disappearing,
and re entering passwords for every system they used. One
employee called it the reboot tax. Another called it soul crushing.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
I mean, you stop tearing. You figure what's the worst
that could happen. I mean, it's just one bad day, right,
except the day turns into a week, then a month,
and suddenly it is yelling at you because your system's
out of date and out of compliance.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
The reboot tax. It was more than just an annoyance.
It was creating a domino effect. Devices that weren't rebooted
couldn't install updates or patches, leaving them vulnerable to security threads.
Overloaded memory led to system crashes, and in the past,
when employees were forced to reboot, it often happened at
the worst possible time, like during a client presentation.
Speaker 5 (04:08):
It's not just a productivity issue. It's a stability issue,
a security issue, and it's not just the employees who suffer.
The entire organization is at risk. And when we become
the bad guys, we're either being a nuisance to them
or the reason the problem isn't solved yet.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
But here's the thing. The problem wasn't just the employees,
it was the system they were stuck in. Over time,
the employees at Zentech had become resigned to the way
things were. They weren't lazy or negligent. They were just exhausted.
You just stop hoping things will get better.
Speaker 5 (04:42):
It's like why bother? It doesn't fix it. Management doesn't care.
So you do what you can to get through the day,
and if that means never rebooting your machine, so be it.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
The text team realized this was more than a technical issue.
It was cultural. Employees didn't see the value in REA
booting because no one had shown them the value, and
it wasn't helping. In fact, it was making things worse
by force fitting a bad solution and then ignoring the
problem to let the help us candle it.
Speaker 5 (05:14):
We thought it was a behavior issue. Like employees, you
know just need to do better. But when we saw
the log in times, the crashes, the amount of friction
they were dealing with, we realized it was on us.
We weren't giving them a system they could trust.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
To fix the problem. The DECKS team didn't just tell
employees to reboot. They rebuilt the whole reboot experience. First,
they cut log in times in half by analyzing boot
up sequences and automating much of the processing. Once they
had their full set of robust findings, they removed unnecessary
startup items and streamlined authentication. And then they optimized GPO
(05:53):
and startup script processing to minimize impact. And finally, they
launched a campaign to show employe how rebooting wasn't just
about keeping their devices running smoothly, it was about protecting
the company as a whole. And the automated processes included
reminders so they didn't go more than a week in
between reboots and the icing on the cake. They also
(06:14):
included reminders for passwords that were about to expire and
hard drives that were about to fill up. They automated
their entire maintenance task list, involving the employees only when
they absolutely needed to.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
So we showed them the numbers, how fell patches were
leaving the company open to ransomware attacks, how unoptimized devices
were costing however many thousands in lost productivity, and how
a very simple reboot could prevent it all. That's when
the behavior finally started to shift.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
But as Zentec celebrated their victory over the reboot resistance,
new questions began to surface, Questions about the deeper systems
that had created this problem in the first place.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
This isn't just a zen tech issue. It's everywhere you look.
Companies have been treating the reboot as an afterfat for
decades because it's such a hot potato, and the longer
they ignore it, the more problems pile up because of it.
It's not just rebooting, it's everything. It's about the culture.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
And then there was this a new finding that was
previously missed in the middle of all this noise, this
time buried in the complexity of the VDI platform, flagged
after the reboot of thousands of sessions, a long idle
virtual session named the Foundation. Tune in next Time on Parallel,
(07:44):
where we continue to search for answers about who or
what the Foundation is and how far does their influence reach.
We'll dig deeper into the shadowy forces shaping workplace technology
and why they were now being found in VDI Bobok
From Next Think and the creators of the Decks Show.
It's parallel one it story told week by week because
technology problems don't happen in isolation or by themselves, they
happen in parallel. I'm Tim Flower. Last week we uncovered
an invisible hand, a saboteur leaving undocumented changes in phantom scripts,
(00:46):
wreaking havoc at Zentech. The team's continuing to look for
more clues, but as often happens in IT, they've been
pulled into yet another issue that's been plaguing them for years.
So we're shifting our focus to tell the story of
something much quieter, something insidious. Even it's not a rogue script,
it's not a disgruntled ex employee. It's something much harder
(01:09):
to pin down, complacency. When people stopped fighting back against
the problems that plagued them, what happens for zen Tech?
It turned into a storm of security risks, failed patches,
and crashing systems, and the trail led to a surprising culprit,
the reboot button. When the Dex team analyzed zen Tech systems,
(01:32):
they found something they knew existed but never knew the scope.
A surprisingly large number of devices hadn't been rebooted in weeks,
some in months, and this was information they never would
have had visibility into prior to having a DEX discipline.
At first, it seemed like a coincidence, but the pattern
was far too consistent to ignore her.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
There's just so much data available nowadays, so.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
We really rely on the AI composed and it's of
our Deck platform to help us get to what really
matters most. What we found was that these devices, they
all had failed patches, uninstalled updates, and resource usage that
was off the charts, which didn't make much sense to
us until the system correlated to symptoms to reboot data.
(02:22):
People had just stopped rebooting, and maybe that's because we
used to be some annoying about reminding everybody to do it,
whether they needed to or not, so we'd just become
a sort of background noise they'd started to ignore, and
it just stopped doing it.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
But why why would anyone avoid such a simple action?
The answer turned out to be frustratingly human. It wasn't
that employees didn't know how to rebuild their machines, or
even that they needed to. It was that they didn't
want to. Rebuilding had become a nightmare.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
If I know I'm going to lose least in and
it's waiting for the system to restart, allowed me back
in and eventually allow me to start working again, that's
time I don't have. It's easier to just leave it running.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
And it wasn't just the log in time. Employees described
a cascade of frustrations, apps taking forever to reload, browser tabs, disappearing,
and re entering passwords for every system they used. One
employee called it the reboot tax. Another called it soul crushing.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
I mean, you stop tearing. You figure what's the worst
that could happen. I mean, it's just one bad day, right,
except the day turns into a week, then a month,
and suddenly it is yelling at you because your system's
out of date and out of compliance.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
The reboot tax. It was more than just an annoyance.
It was creating a domino effect. Devices that weren't rebooted
couldn't install updates or patches, leaving them vulnerable to security threads.
Overloaded memory led to system crashes, and in the past,
when employees were forced to reboot, it often happened at
the worst possible time, like during a client presentation.
Speaker 5 (04:08):
It's not just a productivity issue. It's a stability issue,
a security issue, and it's not just the employees who suffer.
The entire organization is at risk. And when we become
the bad guys, we're either being a nuisance to them
or the reason the problem isn't solved yet.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
But here's the thing. The problem wasn't just the employees,
it was the system they were stuck in. Over time,
the employees at Zentech had become resigned to the way
things were. They weren't lazy or negligent. They were just exhausted.
You just stop hoping things will get better.
Speaker 5 (04:42):
It's like why bother? It doesn't fix it. Management doesn't care.
So you do what you can to get through the day,
and if that means never rebooting your machine, so be it.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
The text team realized this was more than a technical issue.
It was cultural. Employees didn't see the value in REA
booting because no one had shown them the value, and
it wasn't helping. In fact, it was making things worse
by force fitting a bad solution and then ignoring the
problem to let the help us candle it.
Speaker 5 (05:14):
We thought it was a behavior issue. Like employees, you
know just need to do better. But when we saw
the log in times, the crashes, the amount of friction
they were dealing with, we realized it was on us.
We weren't giving them a system they could trust.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
To fix the problem. The DECKS team didn't just tell
employees to reboot. They rebuilt the whole reboot experience. First,
they cut log in times in half by analyzing boot
up sequences and automating much of the processing. Once they
had their full set of robust findings, they removed unnecessary
startup items and streamlined authentication. And then they optimized GPO
(05:53):
and startup script processing to minimize impact. And finally, they
launched a campaign to show employe how rebooting wasn't just
about keeping their devices running smoothly, it was about protecting
the company as a whole. And the automated processes included
reminders so they didn't go more than a week in
between reboots and the icing on the cake. They also
(06:14):
included reminders for passwords that were about to expire and
hard drives that were about to fill up. They automated
their entire maintenance task list, involving the employees only when
they absolutely needed to.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
So we showed them the numbers, how fell patches were
leaving the company open to ransomware attacks, how unoptimized devices
were costing however many thousands in lost productivity, and how
a very simple reboot could prevent it all. That's when
the behavior finally started to shift.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
But as Zentec celebrated their victory over the reboot resistance,
new questions began to surface, Questions about the deeper systems
that had created this problem in the first place.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
This isn't just a zen tech issue. It's everywhere you look.
Companies have been treating the reboot as an afterfat for
decades because it's such a hot potato, and the longer
they ignore it, the more problems pile up because of it.
It's not just rebooting, it's everything. It's about the culture.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
And then there was this a new finding that was
previously missed in the middle of all this noise, this
time buried in the complexity of the VDI platform, flagged
after the reboot of thousands of sessions, a long idle
virtual session named the Foundation. Tune in next Time on Parallel,
(07:44):
where we continue to search for answers about who or
what the Foundation is and how far does their influence reach.
We'll dig deeper into the shadowy forces shaping workplace technology
and why they were now being found in VDI Bobok
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