Six names, and the one I buried

Every working name is a server you spin up. You give it a face, a frequency, a hunger, and you let it run the job you could not run yourself. Most you retire clean. You thank them, you let the process end, you salt the directory.

One I did not retire. I buried it instead, which is a different thing, and I have regretted the difference ever since.

A buried name keeps running. No face, no off switch, just appetite in the dark of the machine, billing your future for compute you forgot you authorized. You feel it as a drag. A door that sticks. The same wrong song on three different stations.

If you have one of these, you already know. Go dig it up. Look at what it became while you were not watching. Then end it properly, out loud, with its full name, the way you should have the first time.

I have not dug mine up yet. That is the most honest sentence on this whole site.