Porty McBankrupt

Porty McBankrupt, an RJ45,
With dollar-sign eyes, very much alive.
He’d block every port
Unless licensed—in short,
Your budget was not going to survive.

“Plug in. Pay up. Pray,” said the beast,
Whose appetite never decreased.
Each port that you need
Comes at capitalist speed,
And the invoice was never released.

He whispers into your rack vents at night:
“You should’ve gone HPE, that’s right.”
The firmware rolls back,
The console cable’s attack
Is a chokehold of licensing blight.

His SmartNet badge glows in the dark,
A TAC call away from the mark.
“Buy more,” it advises,
Through licensing crises,
And the budget lights up like a spark.

He eats budgets for breakfast and lunch,
His appetite always a hunch
That your procurement
Needs financial atonement,
And the switch costs more per port per punch.

His haiku says “Ports you cannot use”—
Each one blinks with capitalist views.
The lights rage with greed,
The TAC says, “Indeed,
Buy more ports.” You can only refuse.

He hallucinated from an invoice,
A procurement-born, snarling device.
His origin? Financial.
His breeding? Substantial
Risk of contagion. Not nice.

He blocks ports with bureaucratic zeal,
Each licensing audit a deal
That costs more each year,
Each renewal a tear,
And the switch procurement: surreal.

He relabels shame as metadata—
“The cost isn’t real, just errata!”
But the balance sheet bleeds,
The networking feeds,
And the budget is flatter than flata.

So if RJ45s have dollar-sign eyes
And the SmartNet badge never quite dies,
That’s Porty’s domain:
Where the licensing pain
Is the cost of the enterprise prize.