Glass and Silence
The first thing they teach you in network engineering: if people are talking, everything is fine. Silence is the enemy.
What they don’t teach you is how to sleep through the night knowing how fragile that silence is.
My tablet lit up at 9:13 a.m.: SEV-1, Toledo.
Emergency communications impacted. 911 call routing degraded. Hospital transfers failing. Local radio still up, but that doesn’t help if the calls never make it into the system.
I was supposed to be at my daughter’s soccer game at ten. I’d missed the last three.
The splice kit landed in the van harder than I meant it to. No time for breakfast. I texted Jess: Work emergency. I’m sorry. She didn’t respond. Why would she.
By 9:16, I was doing ninety on I-80. Not fast enough to be stupid, I told myself. Fast enough to matter.
At 9:34, I pushed it higher anyway. The van shuddered like it was offended by the idea of heroism.
The trooper materialized in my mirror.
I pulled over, hands visible, window down. You learn not to make this complicated.
“License and registration. You know how fast—”
“Yes, sir,” I cut in, because I didn’t trust myself not to ramble. “Network engineer. Fiber cut outside Toledo affecting 911 call routing.”
He studied my license. His radio crackled - something about hospital transfers, failover protocols, dispatch routing manually.
He looked back at me, then keyed his radio. “Unit 12 escorting civilian contractor. Clear eastbound.”
He leaned in slightly. “Don’t make me regret this.”
“No, sir.”
The escort lasted eight minutes. Professional courtesy, or maybe he just wanted to see if I was bullshitting. When we arrived at the site, he pulled alongside, nodded once, and left.
The damage was clean. Backhoe, probably. Two strands severed, ends dark.
I opened the enclosure and started the sequence. Strip, clean, cleave, fuse, sleeve, test. The work is delicate - glass remembers mistakes, but it doesn’t care about your daughter’s game or your wife’s silence or whether you feel like a good person.
Halfway through the second splice, my hands started shaking.
Not from cold. From the thought that I’d been doing ninety, then more than ninety, that I could’ve hit someone, that a cop had trusted me, that somewhere a dispatcher was routing calls by hand - and I was the only person on-call with the kit and access - and I’d almost…
I stopped. Breathed. Finished the splice.
The splicer chirped. My meter settled. Green indicators. Acceptable loss.
Somewhere, 911 calls were connecting again.
I packed the kit and sat in the van, checking my phone.
Nothing from Jess.
The game would be over by now. I’d missed her playing forward for the first time. Fourth game in a row.
I pulled up the team tracker and closed my ticket: Restoration complete. Cause: third-party damage. Recommend trench diversity audit.
No one would read the recommendation. The next cut would happen somewhere else, and someone else would speed toward it, and someone else’s kid would play forward without them.
I drove back at exactly the speed limit.
The soccer game was over by the time I got home. Jess was in the kitchen.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
“She scored twice. Asked where you were.”
“I’m sorry. Toledo had—”
“I know what Toledo had,” she said. “I got your text.”
She turned back to the dishes. I stood there, wanting to explain about the calls, the hospitals, the glass thinner than hair carrying a city’s voice—how it all would’ve stayed dark if I hadn’t—
But she already knew all that.
That was the problem.
I went upstairs to tell my daughter I was proud of her. She was on her iPad, half-listening, and said “thanks Dad” in that tone that meant she’d already learned not to expect me at the important things.
Later that night, I lay awake thinking about the trooper, about the splice, about whether I’d actually been needed or if the backup systems would’ve compensated eventually. Whether I’d endangered people to feel necessary.
The network doesn’t care. It just carries voices—panic, relief, soccer game schedules, apologies that come too late.
If I did my job right, the glass would hold for years.
But I still don’t know if I’m doing anything else right.
I still go when the tablet lights up. Every time. Because someone has to, and I know how, and maybe that’s enough of a reason.
Or maybe I just don’t know how to stop.
