What is this?
Herbert is an IT worker whose days are full of randomness, daily struggles, side hustles, 3D nightmares and plenty of bloopers. New shorts are posted regularly. All videos are hosted on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, so watch them there.
Playlists
Meet the cast
The RegularsHerbert's everyday office crew.
Herbert
Herbert is a calm, dry-witted IT professional with 30+ years in the trenches. He has seen every outage twice and fixes things quietly while everyone else panics.
Loopy
Loopy is the tiny AI assistant and mascot who lives on Herbert’s desk next to the monitor. Loopy, while still learning and training, always offers ways to automate and improve different items via the use of AI. Loopy is the Violoop mascot, shown here with the rights to use its likeness.
Karen
Herbert’s director, 14 years in, confident and buzzword-heavy. She only “knows” ITSM when The Tablet feeds it to her, often in the middle of a sentence.
The Tablet
Karen’s smug, glowing AI device. It always speaks, usually in scenes, insists its way is always right, and continually feels that loops are inferior. It is a parody of workplace AI assistants and is not any real product.
Dale
A tenured IT technician, practical and a little tired. Herbert’s ally in the trenches, Dale has seen every ticket twice and still answers the phone.
The Yes Man
An unassuming member of the team who agrees with whatever Karen and The Tablet say, usually by repeating their last line almost word for word. Cape included.
The Contractor
The team’s remote report specialist, calling in from somewhere nobody can quite place. A hard worker with average results, and his ITIL buzzwords were taught to him secondhand by Karen.
Milo
Herbert and Dale’s counterpart on a sister team overseas. Genuinely sharp at the job, and a shameless kiss-up to Karen who always agrees with her a beat too eagerly.
Trish Plunkett
Senior Strategic Synergy Lead, and a regular. Trish showed up from a “transformation office” nobody remembers approving, with a title that changes every quarter and a lanyard heavy with badges. She learned IT from one very confident webinar and has been certain ever since that she knows it. She does not.
She schedules meetings about meetings, rewrites tickets in a language of her own (“let’s circle back on the root cause”), and takes every correction as a personal attack. Never wrong, never listening, and somehow the I.Q. of the whole room drops while she talks.
Barry Fenwick
Chief Certified Specialist, Trish’s right-hand man, and also a regular. Barry is certified in everything, or so he says, and rattles off acronyms faster than anyone can check them. No one has ever seen a single certificate. The binder is always “somewhere.”
He backs Trish up on every point, earnestly and with a lot of nodding, and once offered to “re-certify” the printer. Sweet, loyal and completely out of his depth, which is exactly why he and Trish get along.
The “Evil” Furless Furby
A sinister, furless AI overlord of the office who is always scheming to take over. He speaks like the Illuminati are in charge, because after all, he is the evil AI. Brief, and deeply untrustworthy. A parody character; it is not a real Furby product.
Jaxon “Jax” Pommer
The eyePair guru, and the newest regular. Jax walked into the office, saw everyone else had a spot on the crew, and felt left out. He wears a beanie indoors, never takes his earbuds out, and knows all things eyePair, from the eyePhone to the eyePad to the ePods.
He tells everyone they should only use the mighty eyePair devices and ecosystem, and he is very full of himself about it. Deep down he just wants to be part of the main crew. eyePair is a parody and is not any real product or brand.
Special CameosFriends who drop in when the story needs them.
Gerry the Ginger
A Space Force veteran who talks like he just got out: “copy that,” “squared away,” “mission accomplished.” Service delivery manager, director, PC builder and network guy, a former coworker and director of Herbert’s, now a close friend, and never without his tinfoil hat.
Santiago
Herbert’s close friend: college-educated, brilliant at designing IT solutions and even better at networking. Proudly from northern Mexico, with stories about family, food and home.
Herbert Remembers…Flashback episodes from Herbert’s early career.
Old Ted
The veteran who trained Herbert back when IT meant pagers, tape backups, dial-up and glowing CRT monitors. Ted kept a drawer of floppy disks “just in case,” labeled every cable twice, and liked to say, “We didn’t have a cloud. We had a closet.”
Gruff, patient and always right about the one thing nobody wanted to hear. Most of what Herbert knows about staying calm during an outage started with Ted.
Mr. Whitfield
A C-suite executive from Herbert’s past who made memorable, questionable IT decisions, and always with total confidence. Cutting the backup budget to “save money” was one. Declaring an outage “not a real emergency” was another.
He measured IT in golf rounds and quarterly slides, and his favorite order was “just make it work by Friday.” Herbert made it work. He has never forgotten.
Wendell “Router” Pruitt
The old-hat Cisco networking guru. Wendell has configured routers since before most of the office could spell VLAN, wears the same broad-brimmed hat to every outage, and keeps a blue console cable draped over his shoulder “just in case.”
He trusts exactly none of his own configs and says, “Did you save running-config to startup?” to anyone who will stand still. They never did.
Roy “Root” Hathaway
The Unix admin guru. Ponytail, beard, black t-shirt and a terminal always open. Roy answers every question with “RTFM,” a man page or a sigh, and has not touched a mouse since 1998.
His uptime is legendary and so is his sarcasm. He has never once rebooted a server, and he will tell you about it.
Norm Novak
The Novell NetWare guru. Cardigan, pocket protector and a floppy disk for every occasion. Norm still mourns the file server that ran for nine years without a reboot, and will gladly explain what a drive mapping used to feel like.
Gentle, proud and perpetually unimpressed by anything that happened after 1996.
Wanda “Warp” Pike
The OS/2 Warp guru. Wanda insists OS/2 was better than Windows, and she has the boxed copy to prove it. The Warp pin on her lapel has never come off.
She will tell you it could multitask long before anyone else, and she will tell you again. She is, frustratingly, often right.
Penny Gantt
The Project Manager. Clipboard, lanyard and a Gantt chart for everything, including lunch. Penny schedules meetings to prepare for meetings and ends each one with “let’s take that offline.”
The project is always 90% done and has been for two years. She is upbeat about it.
Skyler Summers
The Permanent Summer Intern. Backwards cap, intern badge and a giant iced coffee. Skyler arrived for one summer, has been here three, and nobody remembers who hired them.
Eager, cheerful and one wrong click away from deleting production. Everyone loves them anyway.
Herbert’s Home Life CastThe family at home, where work follows Herbert everywhere.
Brenda
Herbert’s wife and a stay-at-home homemaker. Warm, chatty and a little bossy, she is forever rearranging the kitchen, gabbing with the neighbors from the porch, and fussing over the family pets.
Cody
Herbert’s oldest son, 26, who lives on his own. A highly qualified maintenance tech who only ever works on his own car, and groans whenever his dad asks for help around the house. Dry, grumbly, secretly helpful.
Trevor
Herbert’s second son, 24, a journeyman electrician with two young kids. He is sure he knows it all, speaks up at exactly the wrong time, and teases his baby sister at every chance.
Ollie
Herbert’s youngest son, 20, who still lives at home. Gloriously weird: part-time vet cage cleaner and dog walker, chore-doer, gamer, and proud decorator of his room with wild mushrooms.
Savannah
Herbert’s daughter, 19, the baby of the family. She gives as good as she gets from her brothers, and is usually the one who sees through everyone’s excuses.
The Holiday CrewSeasonal oddballs, each awkwardly 3D on purpose. Listed in calendar order, January to December.
Baby Resolution
New Year’s (January 1). A very, very uncomfortable dancing baby in a diaper and a sash, grinning through gritted teeth. No one knows who invited the baby, and the baby does not seem to know either.
He keeps asking, “Is it midnight yet?” and insists, “I did not choose this sash.” Each year he is supposed to be new. Each year he looks more tired.
Lucky O’Leaf
St. Patrick’s Day (March 17). A four-leaf clover sitting on a pot of gold, with eyes that do not match and a mouth that is far too wide. He greets everyone with “Top of the morning. I am very lucky,” and then guards the gold with a hiss: “Mine. All mine.”
Anyone who touches him has a very unlucky week. Do not mention the eyes. He will say, “Never mind my eyes.”
The Peep
Easter (spring, a different Sunday each year). A marshmallow Peep about as tall as an office desk who somehow knows everything about IT, delivered in a cheerful, sugary voice that makes it all the funnier.
He corrects Herbert on DNS, explains why the backup failed before anyone asks, and gets a little sticky when he is proven right. Which is always.
Boomer
Fourth of July (July 4). A big red firecracker on two tiny stick legs, with squinty eyes and a thin, unimpressed mouth. Boomer is all fuse and no patience, a short-tempered patriot who marches into every scene like he has somewhere explosive to be.
He is a man of very few words: a flat “Happy Fourth of July,” and for everything else, “Pop.” He has one stick hand with all its fingers and one with two missing, and a standard reply for anyone who looks: “Do not ask about the fingers.” Everyone nods and slowly takes a step back.
The AI Skeleton
Halloween (October 31). A half-height robotic skeleton who was supposed to be a simple spooky decoration until someone installed “AI” in him. Now he speaks only in buzzword soup (“synergizing the neural blockchain stack”), has opinions about your workflow, and rattles when he gets excited.
Underneath it all he is a good sport, and he can always manage a heartfelt “Happy Halloween!”
The Robotic Turkey
Thanksgiving (fourth Thursday of November). A robotic turkey with one big eye and one small eye, built to say exactly one thing, and he says it with feeling: “Gobble gobble! Happy Thanksgiving!”
He has been told there is more to life than one sentence. He does not believe it. His only fear is the oven timer.
Robotic Santa Claus
Christmas (December 25). A round, glowing-eyed robot Santa who asks what you want for Christmas, and then says “Merry Christmas!” Nothing else is in his programming.
His list is long, his belly is made of servos, and his ho-ho-ho occasionally buffers. He takes the job very seriously and has never once missed a delivery, according to his own logs.
ExtrasThe ones in the background, who are never really in the background.
Chet
A sentient, lumpy orange snack puff in a blonde comb-over wig who is always somewhere in the office, always in front of everyone, and never caught. He babbles under his breath all day, treats the break room as his kingdom, and has no idea he is a snack.
Chet believes he works here. Nobody has the heart to tell him he does not.
Shells
Head of the office cleaning crew, sharp-eyed and no-nonsense, pushing a cart that squeaks on purpose. She has swept this building longer than most of the staff has worked in it, and she notices everything.
She knows a snack puff has been loose in the office for ages and has sworn to catch him. She has never once managed it, and Chet is her nemesis.
About this site and app
Herbert Shorts is also the name of a small personal automation tool owned and operated by The HensStuff Co., the business that owns the Herbert Shorts characters. After a short has been made, the tool uploads it to the channel’s own YouTube account and files it into the matching playlist using the YouTube Data API. It is used only by its owner on its own channel, is not a public service, and does not collect data from visitors or other users. No videos are stored on this website.
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