You translate each line into human hope, but hope, too, fails to download.
Then — silence. Then — the red banner, crisp as a burn: II. The Explanation That Explains Nothing
The F5 client stares from your screen, gray and smug. You close it. You breathe.
You drive to the office. The building is empty. You plug in Ethernet. The network opens like a door you forgot you had a key for.
Some tunnels were never meant to be virtual.
You check the logs. The logs are a confession written in binary and sorrow. “Timeout reading from socket.” “Unable to parse policy.” “Peer certificate mismatch.”
The VPN mocks you from the system tray, gray icon, flatlined, a tiny tombstone for your afternoon.
