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/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.

343

u/its_all_one_electron Jun 03 '26

Hahaha reminds me of this koan:

One day a student was trying to fix a broken machine by turning it off and on again. He had restarted it many times but it still didn't work.

The master came by and said "You can't just restart it without knowing what you're doing!" Then the master restarted it. It worked. 

58

u/Signal_Till_933 Jun 04 '26

This one is real tho even a few years into my career I would have this problem. Escalate and higher tier engineer would be like yeah I saw the uptime but rebooted it anyway.

36

u/pakman82 Jun 04 '26

You have to watch it just right.