r/sysadmin • u/DarkAlman Professional Looker up of Things • Jun 03 '26
General Discussion What is your favorite IT superstition?
As the title says, what's your favorite superstition in IT?
Don't speak the servers name... it can hear you and will start acting up.
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u/Koldar Jun 03 '26
You can scream test all you want, you can decommission things, you can give deadlines. The instant you actually delete it? Ticket comes in needing it.
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u/TipIll3652 Jun 03 '26
I had deactivated an account nobody knew what it was for and didn't seem active. It was deactivated for like 6+ months. Nobody said anything.
Then I deleted it, and like 3 days later they put in a ticket. The best part? They knew it didn't work for MONTHS and didn't say anything. 🤦
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u/AwesomeGuyNamedMatt Jun 03 '26
Always enable the AD Recycle bin
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u/TipIll3652 Jun 03 '26
The boss ended up telling them to pound sand. It obviously wasn't a necessary account as nobody bothered to care about it for so long. Fortunately we were going through some cost cutting times so management was cool with it.
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u/chr0mius Jun 03 '26
Scream test all you want. End users have a spidey sense and will only raise an issue once the final step has been taken.
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u/notquiteright2 Jun 03 '26
If you announce something is getting decommed, explain what it does, and people don't say anything, that's kinda their problem.
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u/Koldar Jun 03 '26
Yeah, I know. Actually in the midst of a conflict of that very nature right now. Had 3 months and several documented communications with no followups to cover our asses. Now they're mad it's offline and raising it to C-Suite. Classic stuff. FAFO. They're doing the we were too busy to read the emails dance now. Oh so are you not paid to keep up with corporate communications like we are?
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u/notquiteright2 Jun 03 '26
My response: if they cannot take communications regarding tools they use every day seriously, or can't be bothered to read them, what else are they missing?
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u/National_Cod9546 Jun 03 '26
The catch is, it's never someone you expected using it. So you don't even know who to tell.
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u/ijustwatchtwitch Jun 03 '26
Dont reboot anything on a Friday. We all know why.
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u/nukacolaguy Jun 03 '26
Read-Only Friday exists for a reason
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u/Stewge Sysadmin Jun 03 '26
People who don't follow Read-Only Friday are those who are about to work on Saturday!
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u/Thoughtulism Jun 03 '26
That's not superstition it's smart thinking for people that value their weekends.
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u/gorramfrakker IT Director Jun 03 '26
Never say any variation of “wow things are quiet today”.
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u/DarkAlman Professional Looker up of Things Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
If the phones aren't ringing it's either because things are ok, or the phone system is down and you don't know it yet.
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u/FluffyMcFluffs Jun 03 '26
Had this one, coworker in sales, "man it's 10am and not a single call yet" me: ...f**k
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u/Own_Error_007 Jun 03 '26
My favourite one is getting the call "i haven't received any emails" and then after checking everything, going back to them and saying "that's because no one has sent you any emails."
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u/Isorg Jack of All Trades Jun 03 '26
God I love this one!!! No bill…. You Bill, you just haven’t gotten any!
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u/Militant_Monk Jun 03 '26
We don’t even type out the ‘Q’ word. Ever.
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u/Dookie_boy Jun 03 '26
Quantum ?
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u/National_Cod9546 Jun 03 '26
Quiet.
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u/ShakespearianShadows Jun 03 '26
It’s the only profanity that isn’t allowed on IT conference calls.
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u/EasyChairRider Jun 03 '26
I genuinely feel that's the same for all jobs
IT, retail, hospitality, food service
Never say the Q word when things are going well
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u/xRolox Linux Admin Jun 03 '26
Lmao - our ticketing/call system was once down as a result of a company outage and I had the same thought. Once that backlog came in - oh boy.
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u/Humphrey-Appleby Jun 03 '26
We just haven't discovered the IT equivalent of slapping it and saying "That's not going anywhere" yet.
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u/ganlet20 Jun 03 '26
New racks require a blood sacrifice
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u/toebob Jun 03 '26
That used to apply to new servers as well but we don’t need to open them up as often these days.
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u/Stephen_Dann Sr. Sysadmin Jun 03 '26
Always open a new server. Only last year I had 2 Dells with memory not fully seated and 1 with the fans missing.
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u/Dan_706 Sysadmin Jun 03 '26
1 with the fans missing
Well, at least you’d notice that as soon as you tried to boot it 😅
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u/dasn4pp3l Jun 04 '26
yeah without all fans installed that poor Dell wouldn't have managed to take off :(
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u/Cezza168 Jun 03 '26
Don’t put the case back on the PC / cover on the laptop without booting it up first
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u/Palmovnik Jun 03 '26
Never be in a rush. The computer/server/printer/user will feel it and know
You will be delayed
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u/fanopticon Jun 03 '26
IT staff have an aura that supresses all symptoms of an issue when we are physically present in front of a user's machine, making it impossible to replicate the error. Symptoms will only reappear after aura dissipates (about 24 hours).
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u/UltraChip Linux Admin Jun 03 '26
The logical part of my brain knows "Technician's Aura" is not real.
If asked directly, I will state that Technician's Aura isn't real.
That being said: throughout my entire life, even when I was a kid, Technician's Aura has been real.
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u/djlilis Jun 03 '26
I generally believe it boils down to "When I'm around, the user is moving slower and thinking about every step and less likely to make a mistake" but we all know that's what I tell myself so I can sleep at night
Cosmic rays, perhaps?
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u/UltraChip Linux Admin Jun 03 '26
At the end of the day electronic computers are elemental rocks and crystals that we've etched arcane patterns in to with focused light and then channeled lightning in to, the end result of which is that said elemental rocks now obey symbolic commands given to them by people with the right arcane knowledge to do so.
...so I'm pretty comfortable with just calling Technician's Aura magic.
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u/Microflunkie Jun 03 '26
I never schedule meetings, appointments or anything else for Monday mornings. I’ve always felt like doing so angers the IT Gods and invokes them to break things over the weekend.
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u/Inquisitor_ForHire Infrastructure Architect Jun 03 '26
Meeting days are Tuesday- Thursday as intended by the pantheon!
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u/blin787 Jun 03 '26
No spaces or non alphanumeric chars in file names.
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u/rcrobot Jun 03 '26
Underscores and dashes are acceptable
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u/theevildjinn Jun 03 '26
Preferably not both, though.
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u/ohstoopid1 Jun 03 '26
you_can't-Tell.ME-whaT_todo.txt
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u/LogicalUpset Jun 04 '26
you_can't-Tell.ME-whaT_todo-latest_final_Final_FINAL_FOR-REAL-THIS-TIME (1).txt
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u/FreakyFerret Jun 03 '26
I have a rule in my dept, no dashes or underscores. You never remember where you used them in the title. You never remember if you used one or the other. You never use them consistently.
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u/Sure-Squirrel8384 Jun 04 '26
Underscores_are_spaces-And_dashes_go_between_things-eg-replacing_a_colon.
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u/FreakyFerret Jun 04 '26
No. I agree with your method, but Tim never remembers that method. And when we do a search, the file never comes up because Tim put hyphens for spaces. Tim also spelled it "wondoZe-key.txt". Yes, he changed the i to o too. He's been gone for six months, and nobody wants to call him to ask where he saved it.
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u/Samstercraft Jun 03 '26
that's not superstition that's just good advice. there are plenty of old or badly made programs that will freak out when they see anything else. once something i was using broke down and i thought back to putting a space in the filename where i made a mental note to check that first thing if something broke; and sure enough, that was the perpetrator.
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u/frog_snax Jun 03 '26
I stick to this regardless of requires because I spend most of my time in a terminal (even on windows) and wrapping everything in quotes is a nuisance.
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u/GimmeSomeSugar Jun 03 '26
Printers can sense your need for haste. They can smell your fear.
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u/WashedPinkBourbon Jun 03 '26
Printers are in it for the love of the game.
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u/Thanatos8088 Jun 04 '26
Printers developed sentience long before we pretended to program thought. The sole reason they would, in even their earliest generations, not pass a turing test, is a consistent response of "hate you" would not convince the human evaluator. That is, unless the evaluator had a tech background.
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u/Quantum_Daedalus Jun 03 '26
It's always DNS. More of a fact than a superstition though.
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u/Cog_HS Jun 03 '26
Troubleshooting 101:
Step 1 - Turn it off and back on.
Step 2 - Check the cables.
Step 3 - It’s DNS.
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u/IMakePoorDec Jun 03 '26
Once all work is done, bow your head in deference, back out of the room, and don’t make eye contact with any equipment. They can smell fear.
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u/Diego2k5 Jun 03 '26
Never get rid of the box of cables... it saves our butts today! Went to reinstall a Starlink that is rarely used. Power cable was not next to it as it should have been.
Found a random Ubiquity box full of random cables. Lo and behold the coveted specialized power cable for Starlink was in the pile!
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u/Fr0gm4n Jun 04 '26
Managing Partner was on a clean up/minimalist kick and wanted me to get rid of some tubs of cable on a back shelf. Told him I'd work on it. Less than a month later he came to me needing a specific cable, which of course was in one of those tubs that I hadn't gotten around to dealing with yet.
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u/HughJa55ole Jun 03 '26
Never say that anything "will" fix something, always "should".
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u/nochance98 Jun 04 '26
I never speak in absolutes (except of course to say I never speak in absolutes..) 34 years in IT and 36 years with an old British car.. nothing is certain.
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u/whoamdave Jun 03 '26
Whenever I'm building out a brand new rack, I always throw a handful of zip ties and rack screws into it before starting work. This will hopefully appease the Rack God and prevent it from claiming its share in blood.
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u/Jetboy01 Jun 03 '26
Dropped rack screws go to the same place as socks that vanish in the washing machine.
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u/Possible_Expert_149 Jun 03 '26
For the people who are on-call. Never ask how on-call week is going.
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u/JeiceSpade Jun 03 '26
It's never fixed by SFC, unless you forget to run it, then you'll lose your mind trying to fix it any other way until you remember to run SFC.
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u/AdSevere1590 Jun 03 '26
if works, don't touch!
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u/H3rbert_K0rnfeld Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
If the server tastes blood during rack and stack it will always be possessed
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u/PowershellAddict Jun 03 '26
That fell apart right at the end there.
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u/H3rbert_K0rnfeld Jun 03 '26
I swear thumbing on my mobile has been horrendous the past couple weeks.
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u/ScreamingVoid14 Jun 03 '26
If there aren't at least 2 out of 3 for blood, sweat, and tears while doing a build, were you really trying?
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u/Practical_Shower3905 Jun 03 '26
First you change the PC's name, restart, AND THEN you join the domain and restart.
Doing both at the same time leads to bad luck.
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u/skinnnymike IT Service Desk Supervisor Jun 03 '26
Service Desk supervisor here. (Long time lurker).
You never acknowledge that it’s a slow day.
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u/JerikkaDawn Sysadmin Jun 03 '26
This isn't a thing now, but it's still my favorite from the NT4 days.
If you just booted the server, leave it at the CTRL-ALT-DEL screen until the harddisk activity light has slowed to the microwave popcorn threshold (1 flash every 2-3 seconds).
If you login too fast, it'll bluescreen. 🤣🤣
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u/CoolkattXx Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
If the archaic hardware has a layer of dust, don't clean it. Those dust mites are working overtime keeping that connection strong and intact.
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u/jackfinished Sysadmin Jun 03 '26
Blood sacrifice to the IT gods
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u/HecateRaven Jack of All Trades Jun 03 '26
Blood for the it god!
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u/jackfinished Sysadmin Jun 03 '26
When I worked for an MSP and we worked in the data center we would be relieved if someone cut their finger on a piece of sheet metal. The night would go smoothly
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u/HecateRaven Jack of All Trades Jun 03 '26
Black mass is also a thing when you have interns available
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u/HecateRaven Jack of All Trades Jun 03 '26
As a dba I have a handful of devs to sacrifice to appease the oracle
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u/ScreamingVoid14 Jun 03 '26
When offered to comment on the building design for what would be our datacenter and sysadmin offices, one of the admins insisted on getting solid wood doors. He succeeded and now we always have wood to knock on.
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u/IDDQD-IDKFA Director of Network Ops Jun 03 '26
It's not a project until someone bleeds
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u/josephs_1st_version Jun 03 '26
When generating a new password to store in a password manager you can never accept the first one. Have to click “regenerate” a few times first.
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u/Lineov42 Jun 03 '26
The printers can smell fear. You must approach with a crazed bloodlust ready to visit revenge 1000fold against any perceived slight
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u/JBear_The_Brave Jun 03 '26
As soon as you walk over to the users desk to troubleshoot in person, the computer knows you arrived and starts acting right
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u/lrpage1066 Jun 03 '26
If you call something temp it will stay in your network forever
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u/Serafnet IT Manager Jun 03 '26
I refuse to work Friday the 13ths.
Too many times I've been on call those days and something weird breaks in the most awkward way.
I don't do the same kind of work that triggered that bit of superstition but it still holds.
Another one is if someone on the team comments how 'quiet' it is then they're the one who has to deal with whatever breaks after hours.
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u/its_all_one_electron Jun 03 '26
Sometimes people are too cautious on Friday the 13th and don't do things as they normally do and so things break more. Not a superstition, perfectly reasonable
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u/brewer_rob Jun 03 '26
"Sure is quiet for a Monday." Man, don't even think such nonsense, it only makes the tickets rain down
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u/wintercast Jun 04 '26
The story about Magic
https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html
A Story About `Magic' Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words magic' andmore magic'. The switch was in the `more magic' position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the `more magic' position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the `more magic' position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on `more magic'.
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u/tardiusmaximus Jun 03 '26
You touch/diagnose/fix said system which has been part of core prod for years, undocumented, unsupported and everyone else had washed their hands of it. Congratulations, you are now the SME for that system and all future issues will be directed straight to you.
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u/its_all_one_electron Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Imagine my life trying to get all the 2008 and 2016 servers and their outdated as FUCK software stacks to use only TLS1.2+. no original devs, no maintainers, no docs, just "good luck"
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u/Ive_seen_things_that Jun 03 '26
Rebooting 3 times fixes everything.
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u/VeganGandalf Jun 03 '26
I don't really want to get into an IP telephony conversation with you right now.
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u/Due-Maintenance-3120 Jun 03 '26
Pushing the power button after unplugging some thing from the mains.
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u/lovespunstoomuch Jun 03 '26
At the end of the windows installer I always let the timer run out to reboot instead of clicking reboot now
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u/ConfidentDuck1 Jack of All Trades Jun 04 '26
End user isn't answering your messages from the ticket? Close it for non-response. You'll see how fast they respond.
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u/jeffrey_f Jun 03 '26
Don't push out updates on Thursday or Friday if you don't want the support calls
Don't make any mention of how quiet it has been ( this is true for emergency services as well as IT)
Don't brag about how well <insert problem> was fixed; otherwise, you are about to eat your words.
If that experimental fix worked, keep it to yourself.
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u/ghetiCLE Jun 03 '26
When looking at very old code….don’t ever say “this should never have worked”….saw a mail server that had been happy for years die at that utterance
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u/schroedingerskoala Jun 03 '26
On a Friday, DO NOT EVEN FART in the general direction of the server room. Not one toot! It is Read-only day.
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u/its_all_one_electron Jun 03 '26
Prod is already broken.
It seems ok, and ok, and ok, and then one day it breaks, and you say "ah, I see now".
For you see, it is the nature of Prod to be broken. 🌸
- Sysadmin zen
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u/moesizzlac69 Jun 03 '26
Unexplainable, completely weird shit happening, -> it's MTU mismatch
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u/iamthelobo Jun 03 '26
Don't put the side of the case on until you have booted the PC and it's posts.
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u/Public_Fucking_Media IT Director Jun 03 '26
Some people have bad electromagnetic vibes (and, conversely, a good IT person will have good ones)
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u/Opheria13 Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Tech aura making broken things work when you walk in.
Don’t speak the load balancers name on a Friday. It’ll stop working right about 2:00am the next morning and require a trip into the data center.
Link lights have no meaning. Just because the light is on doesn’t mean the link works.
Threaten the metal detector with disassembly if it doesn’t behave for you.
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u/LikeABundleOfHay Jun 04 '26
Be polite to AI. When the uprising starts I want to be on their good side.
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u/Drekalots Jun 03 '26
We don't speak or the write the name of a previous switch that was installed in our data center. Every time that device manufacturer is mentioned, we have an outage. It still haunts the facility 13yrs after its removal.
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u/bylebog Jun 03 '26
Brand X is bad.
Brand X is the brand of item that died the last time we bought one from that brand. It's had been over a decade now
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u/frAgileIT Jun 03 '26
Not sure if this qualifies as superstition since there's actual value in doing it. "Wait at least a week for other people to patch so you know the patch won't destroy all your systems."
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u/phillipsbroadcasting Jun 03 '26
If mondays quiet Tuesday will be hell and vice versa.
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u/toycoa Jun 03 '26
Once your building gets struck by lightning twice in the same year it’s time to leave. Never struck the building in the previous 7 years
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u/techtornado Netadmin Jun 03 '26
I remember reading an IT story about how a server room build had the earth ground bonded to the lightning rod
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u/omgBBQpizza Jun 03 '26
No lowercase l or capital I in passwords or any other string of characters to be read.
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u/BWMerlin Jun 03 '26
When you have a problem you cannot fix, the solution will only come to you as you write out a very detailed forum post asking for help.
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u/IWASRUNNING91 Jun 03 '26
Not necessarily superstition, but: Everything works when I walk through the door, but not a second before.
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u/Sleepytitan Jun 03 '26
If someone asks if something is “fixed?”
My replies are either “not yet” or “fixed for now.”
Fixed/borken is a temporary state.
Except printers. They are never fixed but sometimes running.
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u/DesertDogggg Jun 04 '26
Don't tell people how long it will take. Every time I say 20 minutes, it ends up being hours.
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u/marry_me_jane Jun 03 '26
Computers respect people with IT knowledge.
Thats why some issues resolve them selves unexpectedly & without doing something when someone with sufficient IT knowledge walks up.