Ellis never took the certification exam. The $200 fee sat in his cart for a month, then expired. At work, he told his manager he needed to slow down the migration. “We have data quality issues,” he said. “They’re not technical. They’re human.”
Ellis’s daughter, Mira, had stopped speaking to him three weeks ago. Not out of anger—out of something worse. Indifference. She was seventeen, applying to colleges, and she’d asked him to look over her personal essay. He’d said, “Give me twenty minutes, I’m optimizing a materialized view.”
“Dad?”
He closed his laptop.
“I got into State.”
He minimized the Snowflake documentation. “Yeah?”
He blinked. “What?”
Ellis paused the video. He stared at his reflection in the black screen.