Loo Loo Paper Parts
Loo Loo Paper Parts
This document is intended for internal use only. If you are reading this and you do not work at Loo Loo Paper Parts, you have found it because someone left it open on their screen during a meeting. This happens more than you would think.
About Loo Loo Paper Parts
Loo Loo Paper Parts has been manufacturing and distributing specialty paper components from Moncton, New Brunswick since before anyone currently employed here can clearly remember. We manufacture the spindles used in toilet paper and paper towel rolls — the part you use without thinking about who made it. This is, by design, how it works.
We also manufacture the inserts used in CD-ROM cases. These are not popular outside of Moncton for some reason.
We have 247 employees across three facilities. We have a parking situation that has been described as “developing” since 2018. We have a cloud infrastructure that is, by most accounts, running. We have a quarterly performance review process that Raja finds highly motivating for reasons that will become clear.
Our core values are Innovation — when it makes sense, Integrity — always, and Operational Excellence — a worthy goal. These are posted in the main lobby on a vinyl banner that was ordered in 2021 and has not been straightened since installation. Facilities has been notified.
Technology & Cloud Infrastructure Division
The Technology and Cloud Infrastructure Division is responsible for the AWS environment that runs the Loo Loo Paper Parts internal systems, customer portal, and the inventory management platform that replaced the spreadsheet that Doug in Operations had been maintaining since 2000. Doug was not consulted about this decision. Doug is aware.
The cloud division currently consists of four people. This is enough people if everyone does their job correctly. Opinions vary on whether this condition is being met.
Doug has a cat named Dave who may or may not live in Doug’s filing cabinet. Facilities has been notified and has not followed up. This is consistent with Facilities’ general approach to the Doug situation.
Division Personnel
SELENA Cloud Infrastructure Deployment Specialist Technology & Cloud Infrastructure Division
Selena joined Loo Loo Paper Parts with four years of cloud experience, a can-do attitude, and a relationship with the AWS Management Console that her colleagues describe as “immediate” and “concerning.” She is the fastest person in the division to deploy a new service, which is a metric that looks better before you examine what happens next.
Selena’s primary contribution to the division is momentum. Her primary contribution to Bart’s blood pressure is also momentum, though in a different direction.
She accepts console defaults the way other people accept terms and conditions — completely, without reading them, and with total confidence that nothing in there applies to her specifically.
Selena has not yet been wrong about this in a way that cannot be fixed. Bart tracks this statistic personally.
Notable attributes: Fast. Confident. Genuinely capable when the defaults happen to be correct, which is more often than Bart is prepared to admit publicly.
BART Senior Security and Cost Compliance Officer Technology & Cloud Infrastructure Division (Title is self-designated. HR is aware and has chosen not to engage.)
Bart has four monitors. This is not a metaphor. There are four of them, arranged in a configuration that required a facilities request, and a brief but pointed conversation with the building manager about load-bearing desk surfaces.
Monitor one displays the AWS Cost Explorer. Monitor two displays the AWS Security Hub. Monitor three displays the AWS CloudTrail logs. Monitor four displays a rotating set of dashboards that Bart has configured to alert him to conditions that he has determined, through a methodology he has documented in a 47-page internal report about acceptable operational risk that no one has read. Yet.
Bart drinks Jolt! Cola. Not because it is available — it is not, particularly, in Moncton in 2026 — but because Bart has found an international supplier and committed to a recurring subscription that is taken off his bonus. This tells you most of what you need to know about Bart.
He has been right about security vulnerabilities on fourteen documented occasions. He tracks this number. He brings it up.
Notable attributes: Reads everything. Objects to most of it. Has been right often enough that objecting to his objections requires preparation. Has a home lab that he is very proud of. His girlfriend Kim is not sure.
JJ Director of Strategic Cloud Alignment Technology & Cloud Infrastructure Division
JJ’s title was created for JJ. This is not unusual at Loo Loo Paper Parts. What is slightly unusual is that JJ’s role involves attending every cloud-related meeting, asking what things cost, and translating the answers into language that the executive team can present to the board without the board asking follow-up questions.
JJ is very good at this. JJ would also like you to know that he has been following cloud developments closely, has a strong intuition for infrastructure decisions, and recently completed the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course, which he found genuinely useful and mentions more frequently than is strictly necessary. He only completed the course.
JJ wants to understand the cloud. JJ also wants you to know that he understands the cloud. These are related but distinct objectives and the distance between them is, in practice, what Don’t Know Jack is for.
He keeps a pad of coloured Post-it notes on his desk. The top note always says something that sounded more specific when he wrote it than when he re-reads it later.
Notable attributes: Asks the right questions for reasons that are approximately fifty percent genuine curiosity and fifty percent reputation management. The questions are still the right questions. This matters more than the reason.
RAJA Cloud Solutions Architect Technology & Cloud Infrastructure Division
Raja explains things in one line. This is not a stylistic preference. Raja has determined, through years of experience in meetings that run long, that the probability of a correct decision being made in a meeting decreases in inverse proportion to the length of the meeting, and that the most efficient path to the Q4 performance bonus is to resolve technical ambiguity as quickly as possible so that the meeting ends and work resumes.
Raja’s one-line explanations are accurate. This is the part that makes them useful rather than merely efficient. He has the full technical understanding behind each line. He has simply made a professional judgment that delivering it in full would help no one in the room and would specifically not help his bonus.
He is not wrong about this.
Raja has received the Q4 performance bonus in three of the last four years. The year he did not receive it, Selena had deployed something in November that required significant remediation through December. Raja has not mentioned this. Bart has mentioned it several times.
Notable attributes: Technically precise. Motivationally transparent. The only person in the division whose objectives are fully legible to everyone including himself.
A note on how this division operates
Every week, something happens at Loo Loo Paper Parts that involves a cloud decision. Selena deploys something. Bart objects. JJ asks what it costs. Raja explains it in one line.
Loo Loo Paper Parts keeps going.
This is, it turns out, how most organizations work. The names are different. The paper parts may be different. The AWS bill arrives on the same schedule regardless.
Don’t Know Jack exists because the people in those meetings deserve to understand what is happening. Not the engineers — they already know. The project managers, the finance leads, the executives, the product owners who are expected to engage with cloud decisions they were never given a fair chance to understand.
Five minutes a day. One concept. Every day at noon.
You just knew a little more Jack than you did five minutes ago. 🌱
Loo Loo Paper Parts is a fictional company. The cloud decisions are not. Subscribe free at dontknowjack.club