An ill-timed software update hosed scheduled jobs on "twin" servers sometime late Monday night or early Tuesday morning. The essential problem was that the updates required a reboot, which is something I (and the programmer who works most intimately with those servers) can do. But there's a catch: Only the two administrators have logins, and for those scheduled jobs to be manually restarted, someone would have to log in after the reboot.
Naturally, that was the day when one administrator was out of town on business and the other was out sick. Luckily, the out-of-town administrator could be reached by cellphone, and between us, we dealt with it. But the funny thing is, as much as I logically knew exactly what was wrong, what had caused the problem, and what had to be done to fix it, I couldn't help feeling--superstitiously--that the timing was just a bit suspicious--as if the gremlins had been biding their time to pounce when the karma of administrators no longer hung so thickly about the server room.
So I never, ever sneer at people who think that their computers are "out to get" them. Particularly after two years in system administration and desktop support, wherein the gremlin had so often decamped by the time I was at the desk of the person who'd shouted for help. In the absence of a logical explanation, people fill their gap in understanding with the mental caulk most familiar to them. These fractious boxes already seem to have a mind of their own; thus, attributing ill intent to them isn't so great a leap.
The illogic, in a sense, is a logic unto itself. And you have to respect that--meaning respect the reality of it. Because until you fill the information gap with actual facts, the made-up explanation is the reality. And anyone who works with both computers and humans has to square with that if they want to be effective. Why? Because you never, ever want people to be afraid of bringing problems to you--or, worse, trying to fix them with zero-to-little technical knowledge. That situation's a time bomb, technically and organizationally.
