A Night with Hui ‘Enehana ‘Ike

Content warning:
Show warnings

Content warning:
Show warnings

A thin line of drool traced from the corner of Nanea’s mouth down to the wooden desk beneath her head. The makani outside had died down, so only a light breeze danced its way into her room and across her forehead. The pages of the notebook next to her fluttered ever so slightly.

Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.

The desk shook with the vibration of her cell phone. Nanea sat up slowly and shook her head a few times, trying to remember where she was. Her mind was swimming with images of pixelated mountainscapes and she had the strange urge to leap over a too-blue river. Through a thin veil of mind fuzz, she could hear a short, but steady, beeping sound emanating from one of the many devices pushed haphazardly around the desk in front of her. Sitting up a little straighter, her eyes alighted on the bright red notifications flashing across her desktop screen in sync with the beeping. 23 new emails. 45 unread messages on ʻElele.

“Oh, boy,” she muttered under her breath. The mountainscapes and river disappeared, remnants of last nights’ gaming session with her cousins. Now, she was faced with her work laptop humming angrily and a half cup of black tea that was cold to touch. Nanea had been assigned to the overnight on-call position for Hui ʻEnehanaʻIke, the panakō’s catch-all information technology team, and she was supposed to be monitoring the flow of data while another team was doing a large system upgrade for the website. She had even turned up the volume of her ‘Elele notifications in an attempt to keep herself awake, but that strategy seemed to have failed. Evidently, she had fallen asleep in the middle of the upgrade deployment, and something had gone wrong. She wiped away the fine layer of sweat that had formed on her forehead and tapped her phone to answer the incoming call.

“Hello?” She murmured.

“Nanea! Where have you been?!”

Nanea grimaced. The sound of her manager Maʻa’s half-awake yet fully exasperated voice blasted through the phone’s speakers. “Hey, kala mai,” she apologized. “I fell asleep, what’s going on?”

“I’ve been trying to get through to you for nearly fifteen minutes. Teams don’t do late-night deployments because it means there’s extra time to relax.”

Nanea sighed and pinched her cheeks as she tried to wake up while Maʻa continued to berate her.

“I thought you were supposed to have a knack for staying up late after sleeping through the afternoon? Remind me to call you for sleeping advice some other time, huh? Anyway–have you read through these emails yet? The upgrade seems to have gone through successfully, but now the testers are in the system, and they aren’t able to see the right data. Can you check the latest email that they sent? It should have a timestamp of 4:01.”

Nanea winced at the mention of the time. She navigated to her email and searched for the timestamp in her inbox.

“Do you see it?” Maʻa asked impatiently.

“Yup!” Nanea answered quickly, opening one of the many unread messages clogging her screen. “I think I found it. I’m reading it now.”

From: Work Order Updates

Subject: 1 Task Added. Work order number: 9005. Org: Hui ʻEnehanaʻIke.

Status: URGENT.

I am not able to access the internal client data for multiple users from inoa hope Kāpili to inoa hope Kūʻaeʻa when conducting a routine moʻokūʻauhau analysis via the admin-side portal of the Profile page of the website. I am not able to see inoa beyond the most immediate circle of relatives, and the Personal Information sections are empty. Please advise. My ID # is 698237.

“One of the testers isn’t able to see the right data. Can you check on that, please? The only error logs we have keep saying that the data wasn’t found. I think it might have something to do with this intense makani we’ve had lately. You may need to check the greenhouses.”

Nanea bit her upper lip and silently clenched her fist. She should have known better than to volunteer as the on-call assistant in the middle of hoʻoilo. Something like this was bound to happen.

“Also,” Maʻa added, “I don’t want another repeat of what happened last month. I convinced the big bosses that that was a one-time mistake, but you had better not be trying to prove me wrong.”

Nanea winced at the threat. She had been the only one on call for a late afternoon deployment several weeks ago, but she had—unsurprisingly—fallen asleep in the middle of the afternoon while working from home and didn’t wake up until the around midnight to several voicemails from Maʻa about the panakō facing a minor shutdown. They ended up being out of commission until noon that day, and while the largest user-facing consequences were a small handful of angry customers, the higher-ups (Big Boss and co.) were very disappointed and brought the hammer down on Maʻa, who, in turn, brought a smaller, but no less impactful, hammer down on Nanea.

“Of course, I understand,” she said quickly into the phone, “I’m looking into this now.” Nanea pulled up a map of the server rooms on her personal secondary monitor, which she had hooked up to her work computer to use as an extended desktop. At the same time, she closed out a few windows with half-watched playthroughs of the Graceful Gamble online multiplayer video game and took a large gulp of her ice-cold tea. “Ach,” she retched at the bitter flavor.

“Mahalo, Nanea.” Maʻa said through a stifled yawn. “And try not to fall asleep this time. I have to be up on time tomorrow–well, this morning, so I won’t be available again tonight. But plan to meet me in the office around 8 to give me a report on how everything went.”

“Alright,” she responded, silently cursing herself. Usually, team members got the day off after a late-night deployment, but evidently Maʻa wasn’t going to let her go so easily. “Again, really sorry about falling asleep.”

Maʻa sighed audibly. “Talk later.”

She hung up the phone and buried her face in her hands for a moment. Just six months ago she had been let go from her previous job for sleeping in a few too many times and not getting to the office in a “timely and consistent manner.” She could not let this happen again. With another gulp of bitter tea, she tried to shake the sleep from her eyes and looked back at the desktop monitor. The map of the greenhouses was a combination of tiny red, yellow, and green lights that blinked on and off intermittently. She clicked on the “K” icon on the left-hand side, triggering the map to zoom into a small corner of the chart where the red and yellow lights were far outnumbering the greens. It looked like the server room in charge of storing clients’ Ka- through Kū- was not functioning properly.

“Ugh,” Nanea groaned. She would have to go out and check on them.

Opening ‘Elele, Nanea searched for the name of the team lead in charge of the system upgrade that night. Ignoring the multitude of unread messages that flooded her screen as soon as she opened their conversation window, she shot off a quick message:

“Looking into 9005 right now. Yellow and red in the server room. I’ll check it out shortly and will be in touch.”

The team lead, Kaʻua, responded immediately: “Keep me in the loop.”

Nanea groaned, stood up from her desk chair, and looked around the room. A gust of makani blew in and cooled the sweat on her neck, causing her to shiver for a moment uncontrollably. The storm from earlier that night had blown over a number of fliers she was supposed to hand out at a volunteer work event that upcoming weekend. Now, she could see that they had infiltrated every corner of her room, in and around her laundry basket and tucked between the pillows on her bed. She would have to clean it all up when she got back. For now, she closed and tucked her laptop into her backpack, along with a few other necessities, grabbed her rain jacket off the edge of her desk and made her way out the door.

Once outside, she swung her backpack on and hopped onto her bike to make her way toward the offices. As she neared the edge of town, she could see the lights of the main building, and the large expanse of dimly lit grassy fields behind it where the greenhouses were situated. She rode up to the entrance gate where Keoki, the security guard on duty that night, was sitting.

“Hey, Keoki,” she said, trying to catch her breath as she paused in front of the booth. She could see her breath shimmering in the light as she spoke.

“Aloha,” he replied, shifting in the booth to face her.

“I gotta check in the greenhouses for something going on with the deployment. Can I get through with my ID?”

“Oh yeah,” he nodded, “should be fine.” He waved absentmindedly toward the office building. “Let me know if you need anything.”

“Gotcha, mahalo.” Nanea hopped back on her bike and headed toward the greenhouses.

Once she reached the edge of the field, she slid off her bike and continued on foot. The greenhouses each stood around ten feet tall, filled with row upon row of tables of pūʻolo–large green bundles of ti leaf that were hooked up to different wires. The wires transferred data between the bundles and the larger cables that ran along the greenhouse ceilings. These in turn ran all the way to the office building, where the data could be accessed and modified as needed via user-friendly computer interfaces.

After walking for several minutes, Nanea reached the greenhouse that contained data from Ka- to Kū-, demarcated in large print across the side, and turned the corner to enter.

“Uh oh,” she said, peering through the darkness.

A branch was leaning against one of the double doors, propping it ajar. She looked out at the field surrounding her. A large Albizia was stretched out on the ground nearby, its roots upturned at the edge of the forest about ten yards away and its bare fingertips reaching toward the ground where Nanea was standing. She could see a number of branches from other trees as well, all scattered along the ground.

“I thought they were working on clearing all of these,” she said to herself. Albizia was a known invasive species that had a tendency for collapsing unexpectedly. Plus, with all the strong makani lately, the odds of one of them falling was even greater. The greenhouse doors were automatically locked upon closing with extra strength deadbolts, but some of the locks were old, and this one clearly hadn’t been replaced in time.

Nanea walked up to push the door open, flinching at the ice-cold touch of the metal door handle. Bracing herself, and pulling her jacket sleeve up to cover her palm, she confidently pushed open the door and walked inside. Everything was silent except for the soft hum of ‘ike in the pūʻolo and the makani continuing to blow in the distance.

“Hello?” She called out as she turned on the light, but nothing made a sound or scrambled out of sight. Usually, inside the greenhouses, the air was kept to a cool-yet-warm 70 degrees to ensure the best environment for the pūʻolo bundles to maintain their shape and health for as long as possible. However, with the door propped open all night, the cool, dark air had been flowing inside for hours and Nanea shivered as she walked into the structure.

She leaned her bike up against the wall and attempted to close the door behind her, tossing aside the rusted lock and pushing a box in front of the foot of the door to keep it shut. Turning around, she looked at the pūʻolo on the tables. Near the doorway, a few of them had blown onto their sides, wires twisted around one another and hanging down in all the wrong places. She would have to fix what she could and notify the Hui Kupuna if any needed to be replaced.

Sighing, Nanea opened her computer to verify that the damaged pūʻolo matched the ones with red and yellow signals on the system map. Before she could look at the map, however, she was faced with a number of new messages from Kaʻua, the team lead she had contacted earlier.

10 minutes ago: “How is everything going?”

5 minutes ago: “Were you able to check out the pūʻolo?”

1 minute ago: “What’s your status?”

Jeez, Nanea thought to herself.

“Checking on it now,” she responded promptly, rolling her eyes behind the safety of her computer screen.

She then opened the map of the pūʻolo, complete with their red, yellow, and green signals. After copying the identification numbers to her phone, she walked up to the pūʻolo that had been blown over and confirmed that they had numbers matching the ones on her list.

Around each of the pūʻolo were a series of wires, all placed so that they reached between the folds of the lau to the ʻike contained inside. The inside was always just out of sight, neatly tucked away. Nanea had never seen it, and in fact had no idea what it might look like. The Hui Kupuna kept their ʻike under heavy wraps, so that it would not fall into the wrong hands. After their initial placement in the greenhouses, the Hui ʻEnehanaʻIke–Nanea’s hui–took over and were responsible for appropriate management of the pūʻolo. This meant making sure that they were always functioning and if they weren’t, making whatever small change was necessary or contacting the Hui Kupuna technicians and notifying them of the issue.

When she got up close, Nanea could see that the damage wasn’t great–a few pūʻolo had been knocked on their sides, and some wires had come loose that could be easily fixed. She dutifully righted the fallen ones, and carefully tucked the wires back in where necessary.

One of the pūʻolo appeared to have some fraying on the lau itself, which she could see were yellowing with age. Jumping back to her computer for a moment, Nanea sent an email off to hui.kupuna@panakō.com and let them know the whereabouts of the aging pūʻolo. There was no danger of the pūʻolo falling apart unexpectedly, at least not for a few more weeks, but it was best to give the Hui a heads up so that they could get to it sooner rather than later. While in her inbox, Nanea also sent off an email to the greenhouse groundskeepers, letting them know about the Albizia and the lock on the door. She then conducted a manual resync of the pūʻolo map and saw the lights turn green on all of the ones that had previously fallen over.

“Sweet,” she said, drumming her hands on the table in celebration. The black tea from earlier was starting to kick in, as well as her impromptu nap, and she jumped up and down for a moment to settle her new-found energy. She pulled the ʻElele app up on her desktop and searched for Kaʻua’s name and chat box.

“Just got the pūʻolo up and running again,” she messaged. “Can you have the users retest?”

Kaʻua responded quickly. “Testing now.”

While she waited, Nanea opened her email and found the initial work order notification. She clicked on the link to take her to the order portal, where she added a comment saying that the issue had been resolved and asking them to test again.

After a minute of staring at her computer screen and waiting for something new to happen, Nanea hopped up on the table and leaned against the wall of the greenhouse, taking a deep breath. She could have gone back home, but figured she should stay out in the event that something else was going to happen. The temperature control system had begun to kick in and she breathed in the warm air, shedding her jacket and hanging it on the handlebars of her bike.

Nanea recapped the events of the night so far to herself. She couldn’t get fired again over her inability to hold a normal sleep schedule. It was her fault anyway, she had stayed up the previous night playing a video game with her cousins online–Graceful Gamble, the latest installment of the Stormy Skies series. Her cousins all lived elsewhere, so they would play games online, and they had an unhealthy knack for staying up way too late in hopes of reaching the next layer of the in-game universe. One of her cousins was even ranked on one of the worldwide forums, so they had a tendency to take these things too seriously. Groaning, Nanea sat up at the sound of a notification beep and looked at her computer.

One new message from Kaʻua: “Not working still. What fix did you do?”

“Some of the pūʻolo were knocked over in the greenhouse. I set them up and reset the wires in them,” she responded, shaking her head in frustration. She thought for a moment about what else might be causing the issue. “Maybe there’s something wrong along the cable path?”

If there was something wrong with the cables–which funneled data between the different islands–she would have to stay out in the cold for much longer than she had wanted, and she would need to travel farther than she could easily bike. She sighed and looked back at her computer. There was another new message.

“Something might be wrong with the cables. User is able to see the information, but now the page is taking an extra-long time to load.”

“And it’s not a local issue?” Nanea asked.

“No, it looks like everything is slow now. Can you check?”

“Send me an ID.”

“Same user. 698237.”

“Checking.”

Nanea opened up the logs from the deployed service and looked for the user ID. There were a few Not Found error messages, but they didn’t follow a clear pattern.

“Are you at the greenhouses?” Kaʻua asked. “Can you take a car and go check the cable station?”

“Damn,” Nanea whispered to herself. Since she was the only one out and about already, she would have to check out the cable station herself.

“Will do,” she responded on ʻElele.

Nanea packed up her things and turned the light out at the greenhouse, making sure to close the door behind her as she left. Hopefully the handle alone would hold until the groundskeepers could swing by. She walked out from between them, noticing that the sky was beginning to lighten. Once out of the greenhouse area, she jumped on her bike and rode toward the main offices. If the issue wasn’t fixed before the panakō was officially opened, or before her meeting with Maʻa at 8, there would be hell to pay. Especially since she had wasted all of that valuable time falling asleep on the job earlier.

“Hey, Keoki,” Nanea said, pedaling back up to the security office. “Can I get into the garage? I need to take a car out to go and check the Puʻuloa cable station. Something might be up with one of the cables.”

“Oh, sure. Let me walk you over.”

Together, they walked over to the security garage, where work vehicles and other large machinery were housed for easy access by those in the building. There were a few cars stored for cases like this–when office members needed to travel at unexpected times to a location quickly. Nanea parked her bike at the far end of the garage, jamming it behind the bike rack itself in hopes that this would deter any opportunistic thieves. She hadn’t brought her locks, since she didn’t realize she would be driving out from the office that evening, so she crossed her fingers and silently hoped that her bike would be okay. She then jogged to keep up with Keoki as he pointed out the vehicle that she could use. Once Nanea’s ID number was logged into the borrowing system, Keoki handed over the keys and she jumped in.

“You’ve got it for 24 hours,” Keoki said in a surprisingly grave voice through the car’s open window. “After that, we’ll start looking for you.” He then winked at her and slapped the side of the car, smiling.

“I’ll bring it back on time,” Nanea reassured him as he laughed. She quickly took stock of the car’s interior before carefully navigating it out of the garage and off the property.

Nanea drove away from the office building and out toward a cluster of short apartments in the distance. The clock on the dashboard read 6:23 AM, immediately triggering a sour taste at the back of her throat. She had only about an hour and a half to rectify this issue or she was pretty sure she’d be out of a job. She put a little more weight on the gas pedal.

Some twenty minutes later, Nanea pulled up to a short, concrete building that was situated a hundred yards off the water. There was a gravel clearing just to the right, with a truck parked there. Nanea pulled up next to it before brushing herself off and heading up to the small building. The scent of the ocean spray hit her nose with force, and she breathed in deeply, wondering when the last time was that she actually went to the beach. She had spent the last few weekends mostly asleep, catching up on her rest after some busier days at work and some unexpectedly late nights on the computer. Her hair wrapped itself around her face and neck and she had to grab it and hold it down so she could see where she was going. The makani here was stronger than near the offices or her apartment.

She walked up to a large metal door and rapped her knuckles forcefully against it. The hinges looked like they had been recently replaced, a sharp contrast to the mix of brown dirt and white sand crawling up the bottom half of the door itself. She could hear movement on the other side, and then it swung open to reveal an older aunty dressed in a pair of jeans and a baggy sweater.

“Are you here from the main offices?” She asked.

“Yes,” Nanea responded. “We’ve had some complaints about slowness on the website, and I’m supposed to come down and check it out.”

“I’m Benny, come on in,” she gestured toward the back room and left the doorway open for Nanea to enter. She pulled a thick rain jacket off the back of a chair and swung it on over her shoulders, adding a shh noise to accompany her heavy footsteps as she moved around in the office.

Nanea followed Benny inside, where she was met with walls of monitors and various devices covered in an array of buttons.

Benny pointed to a red blinking light. “That one came on just a few minutes ago, right after the makani picked up around here. I called the main office to let them know, but couldn’t get a call through. Good timing that you came now anyway. We can go together and check out what’s going on out there.” She grabbed a flashlight that was hanging on the wall and led them out of the building.

“Sounds good,” Nanea muttered in response, pulling her rain jacket tightly around her.

Benny led Nanea out of the station and away from the beach, following a small gravel path into the surrounding forest. Quickly, they were enveloped into the surrounding greenery.

Nanea had never been out to a cable station before–in fact, she had missed that day of orientation when she first started at the panakō. But she had heard about the cable line stewards, those like Benny who usually descended from generations of ʻohana living out near the cable stations, long-term custodians of the ‘āina and, in turn, the cable lines that ran through them, enabling communication across the islands.

As they walked, Nanea noticed Benny’s flashlight alight on the pāpōhaku, about a foot tall, running parallel to their walking path. She knew the cables were stored inside, and began to lift her feet a little higher and set them down a little softer as she continued walking. Lining either side of the pā was an ongoing procession of ti plants, both juvenile and adult.  The  adultti had some of the broadest, largest lau that Nanea had ever seen.

“I’ve never actually visited the pā before,” she said out loud. “Is this where they gather lāʻī to make the pūʻolo?” she asked.

“Yes,” Benny responded, glancing to see where Nanea was pointing. “Here and in other places as well. Many of these ti have been growing for decades now.” She paused for a moment. “I think about all the work you guys do, you know, up in those offices, and I think that all of that work actually starts from right here, in the ground, all covered in the earth and the pōhaku and the ti. Most people don’t even know it, but it all starts right here.”

Nanea nodded, taking the information in. She was beginning to think about all the long nights she had spent crouched over her computer trying to get a program working again. Her scuffed up desktop and hand-me-down office chair were a far cry from the soil and vegetation flourishing beneath her shoes at the moment.

“Ah,” Benny sighed. “Looks like something fell.” She motioned up ahead.

“Oh no,” Nanea gasped.

Together, they walked up to the damaged section where the branch had fallen. The ti were disheveled and a few had actually broken in half. A few pōhaku from the upper layer of the pā had toppled over, and Nanea caught a glimpse of something dark green underneath.

“It's not too bad,” said Benny, quelling Nanea’s worries that she would have to report bad news to her boss in nearly an hour. “Sometimes this happens.”

She lifted the branch up, gesturing to Nanea to give her a hand. Together, they lifted it up and over, carefully laying it on the ground parallel to the pā. Then, Benny placed the fallen pōhaku back into their respective places, covering up the dark green cable lying underneath.

“I’ll contact the Hui about this when I get back,” she said. “They’ll send someone to double check everything.”

“Hopefully everything is working now,” Nanea wondered aloud.

“I guess we’ll have to head back and see.” Benny clapped her hands together and began walking back along the pathway. In due time, they made it back to the station house, where Benny confirmed that everything was running smoothly once again.

Nanea breathed a sigh of relief. “Mahalo for all your help,” she said as she left the station, waving goodbye.

Benny waved back. “Just give me a call if there’s anything else you need.”

Once in the warmth of the car, Nanea opened her laptop and sent another message to Kaʻua, letting him know that the cable issue had been rectified, noting the time on the dashboard clock as 7:33 AM. She waited a few minutes for Kaʻua to respond saying that everything looked okay from the tester's side, and then drove back to the main office, already rehearsing an apology speech in her head for Maʻa. By the time she got back to the office, Keoki had already switched shifts with a new security guard, so Nanea left the keys with the new officer before walking over to the main office building. She continued running through a half-hearted apology speech in her head as she entered through the main lobby.

By the time she arrived at her desk, she could see Maʻa waiting in his office, drinking his morning coffee. He looked up expectantly as she walked in through the doorway.

“All good?” He asked.

“Yup,” Nanea nodded, wringing her hands together nervously. He had probably already been filled in by Kaʻua. “Sorry about falling asleep again,” she apologized, trying to suppress a yawn. The black tea and the cool night air were wearing off, and the silence of the office was starting to lull her into a state of drowsiness. So much for her well-rehearsed speech.

Maʻa sighed. “I heard that you ran all over town fixing the problem. Mahalo for that. Just—try not to let it happen again, okay?” He responded.

“You got it,” she said, running her fingers nervously along the bottom of her jacket, still unsure whether she should be bracing herself for a verbal tirade.

He looked at her for a moment. “Alright, take the day off. You’ve had a long night. See you tomorrow,” he nodded.

Nanea breathed a sigh of relief. Maʻa was usually more bark than he was bite, and he generally didn’t mind her lack of precise timeliness as long as her work was up to par. “Will do, mahalo, see you tomorrow,” she said as she walked out of his office.

Nanea retrieved her bike from the security garage and began riding back to her apartment. The cold air of the night before had all but faded, and by the time she got home, she was sweating and feeling uncomfortably hot in her rain jacket. She jumped into the shower to rinse off the sweat and random pieces of dirt she had accumulated, thinking about the cable lines that she had walked along earlier, imagining the dirt on her ankles as bits and pieces of the machinery used to build the pūʻolo transmission lines or her Internet router. Once out of the shower, Nanea stood and watched the rays of light streaming in through the open windows before slinking over to her bed, laying down and slowly warming up in the sun-soaked sheets. The crinkle of an event flyer was the only sound emitted as her mind drifted off into thoughts of knotted and twisted roots erupting from the electrical socket in her wall, running the length of her Ethernet cord and then merging and solidifying with a pile of dirt and moss at the base of her desktop monitor.

Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

Like Loading...