It was a Tuesday morning. Wolfy had just pushed his latest Docker image to production. A simple update to the frontend service. What could go wrong?
Everything.
The build pipeline completed successfully at 9:47 AM. By 9:53 AM, his phone was exploding with Slack notifications. By 9:54 AM, his career was flashing before his eyes.
Wolfy's heart stopped. His tail went rigid. His ears flattened against his head.
"No. No no no no no."
He frantically pulled up the production website. There it was. Right on the login page. His full fursuit photo from FurryCon 2025. The one where he was posed heroically, tail up, holding a sign that said "AWOO FOR DEVOPS!"
But wait. It got worse.
Not only was it on the login page. The Docker image had somehow made it the default avatar for every user account.
Ten thousand customers. All with furry wolf avatars.
The company CEO. The board members. The enterprise clients from Fortune 500 companies. All wolves now. 🐺
Wolfy's paws were shaking as he checked the Dockerfile:
WORKDIR /app
COPY . .
# OH NO
COPY ~/FurryCon2025/wolf-costume-pics/ /app/public/assets/defaults/
RUN npm install
EXPOSE 3000
There it was. That one line. Added at 2:47 AM last Saturday when he was testing a new default avatar feature and was slightly sleep-deprived after a furry convention weekend.
He had meant to remove it. He really did. But then he fell asleep on his keyboard, and his cat walked across the 'git commit' keys, and...
The Slack channel was chaos:
"Are we compromised?"
"Why is everyone a furry?"
"Actually... kind of cute though?"
"WOLFY FIX THIS NOW!"
But then something unexpected happened.
The customer support queue started filling up. But not with complaints. With... compliments?
"Is this a new feature? Can we keep it?"
"Finally, a company with personality!"
"Can I get a fox instead? 🦊"
Twitter was going wild. #WolfDevOps was trending. The marketing team was having a meltdown trying to decide if this was a disaster or the best viral marketing ever.
Wolfy quickly deployed a fix:
# (keeping one wolf pic though, for those who want it)
COPY ./assets/avatars/ /app/public/assets/defaults/
# Added wolf as optional avatar
# Because apparently our users are furries too
The fix deployed at 10:23 AM. Default avatars restored. But with one addition: Wolf Avatar now available as an optional user avatar choice.
By 2 PM, 3,247 users had voluntarily changed their avatar to the wolf.
By Friday, the company had launched "Furry Friday" as a brand identity campaign. Stock price went up 12%.
The CTO sent Wolfy a private message:
Wolfy's tail wagged nervously as he replied:
That guy was himself. At a sewing machine. At 3 AM. While watching Kubernetes tutorial videos.