The Brain Drain Blues

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
They say that Joe retired,
Just packed it up, inspired.
His scripts were held by hope and glue,
Now no one knows what they all do.

[Verse 2]
Then Sarah waved goodbye,
No hint, no reason why.
She knew that server’s secret spell,
Now we just guess and hope it’s well...

[Chorus 1]
We don’t have the knowledge,
We don’t know what was done.
This code’s a cursed cathedral
Built in 1991.
The veterans are missing,
We’re guessing every day—
Welcome to the Brain Drain,
We ship it anyway!

[Verse 3]
New hires roll the dice,
Each fix comes with a price.
The code’s a maze of bygone lore,
With comments lost in ‘94.

[Bridge – Spoken/Sung, slightly dramatic and dry humor]
“There’s code that pings a fax machine.”
“This one’s in Perl—was that... a meme?”
“A comment reads ‘FIX THIS SOMEDAY’—
It’s dated back to Y2K.”

[Chorus 2]
We don’t have the knowledge,
We don’t know what we broke.
Our dashboards cough out hieroglyphs,
The CI’s just a joke.
The sages all departed,
Now we fumble, cry, and pray.
We’re stuck inside the Brain Drain,
And drowning more each day.

[Outro – Soft fade with humor, slightly wistful]
So if you find a READ-ME,
Please treat it like pure gold—
It might just be the only clue
To systems ten years old...