Sysadmin life Memes

Posts tagged with Sysadmin life

What Was The Craziest "If It Works, Don't Touch It" Projects Of Your Life

What Was The Craziest "If It Works, Don't Touch It" Projects Of Your Life
You know that legacy codebase held together by duct tape, prayers, and a single try-catch block? Yeah, this is its physical manifestation. Someone's got a VGA-to-PS/2 adapter chained to what looks like a USB converter, all dangling precariously from the back of a machine that's probably running critical production systems. The "there is always a WAY" caption captures that beautiful moment when you realize your Frankenstein solution actually works, and now you're too terrified to touch it. Nobody knows why it works. Nobody WANTS to know. The documentation is just a sticky note that says "DON'T UNPLUG." It's been running for 847 days straight. The company's entire billing system depends on it. And if you breathe on it wrong, the whole thing collapses like a poorly written recursive function without a base case.

IT Guys Listening To Non IT People Talk About Computers

IT Guys Listening To Non IT People Talk About Computers
You know that look. The one where you're physically present but mentally calculating how many years of your life you've lost listening to someone explain that their computer is "broken" because they haven't tried turning it off and on again. Or when they call the monitor "the computer" and the actual tower "the hard drive." Or when they say their internet is down but they just closed the browser window. It's not anger. It's not even frustration anymore. It's transcendence. You've reached a zen-like state where you can smile and nod while internally screaming into the void. Every fiber of your being wants to correct them, but you've learned that explaining the difference between RAM and storage for the fifteenth time won't help. They'll still download more RAM next week.

I'm Too Old For This Tech

I'm Too Old For This Tech
The classic "IT person as unappreciated hero" syndrome strikes again! When you've spent years battling printers that randomly decide to speak in tongues, servers that choose 3 PM on Friday to have existential crises, and users who think "have you tried turning it off and on again" is revolutionary advice... you start to feel like a grizzled detective in a tech noir film. The badge and gun? Those were earned in the trenches of weekend deployments and emergency patches. The real question is why management always looks surprised when IT folks display the thousand-yard stare of someone who's seen too many "unexpected error" messages.

Bad Gateway: The Sysadmin Negotiation Technique

Bad Gateway: The Sysadmin Negotiation Technique
That moment when your router becomes the literal embodiment of HTTP 502. "Listen here you little $#!%, I didn't spend 4 hours configuring nginx just to have you decide not to proxy my requests!" The classic finger-pointing blame game we all play with our hardware when the real problem is probably that one misconfigured line in nginx.conf we're too stubborn to double-check. Because clearly, intimidating the router is a more efficient debugging strategy.

The Power Button Pilgrimage

The Power Button Pilgrimage
Person: "Why are IT guys such d***s?" IT guy: "Last week I drove two hours to push the power button on a server that three separate people assured me was already on." And that, friends, is why we drink coffee like it's oxygen and trust no one. Not even the power indicator light.

Trust But Verify (Or Drive Two Hours)

Trust But Verify (Or Drive Two Hours)
The eternal IT paradox: "Trust but verify" taken to its logical extreme. Poor Eric drove two hours just to press a power button that three people swore was already on. This is why we develop trust issues and insist on seeing error logs ourselves. Nothing quite builds character like a 4-hour round trip to flip a switch that takes 2 seconds. The server was probably running perfectly... in someone's imagination.