Maybe it’s a sign of my relative inexperience in the wide, wide world of enterprise IT, but a part of me always thought the happy, preppy IT company with a silly name and a cultish fixation on cultivating their employee community was an exaggeration. Of course many companies fulfill the exaggeration in part: Flickr, Twitter, Itch.io for names, and the truly agonizing state of being a Facebook employee lovingly referred to by Zuckmeister M as ‘Metamates.’

Then comes Splunk, splunking into my field of awareness like the few-letters-off-from-a-GTA-joke it is. During my perennial job search I came across them; during my orientation with their service I embraced the Splunk life.

Well, sort of. After hours of preparing applications and then making room in my inbox for the inevitable slew of rejection emails, I could only take so much splunking. The Splunk feed was immense, and I had just scratched the surface with orientation videos–but it was already too much. How is a Splunker expected to Splunk for hours a day, then Splunk on home to the Splunk cafe to Splunk the night away so they can Splunk it all over again?

You may think I exaggerate the term, but if anything I underuse it compared to a true Splunker. The Splunk life isn’t for me. I’m not Splunk enough. So I’ll just Splunk off to Splunksville’s bus station and return to my old life, trying to forget that somewhere out there, day in and day out there exists a cabal of Splunksters so splunked up they can splunk like it’s splunknd nature.

The worst part? It fucking works.