It's been nearly a decade since I had to wear the "Sys. Admin." hat full-time, but apparently the karma that goes with that role hasn't entirely worn off. Today was the first time I realised that this can sometimes be a mixed blessing.
Let me back up for a bit and first define what I mean by "Sys. Admin. karma." Let's say you work in an office environment and your computer is, for lack of a better term, "being stupid." Maybe you've already rebooted, or maybe that would throw the proverbial monkey-wrench into your current workflow. Either way, you're hosed, and it's time to call in someone whose job it is to un-hose you.
Back in the Day(TM), in another country, in another industry, that would have been me...when I wasn't babysitting servers or refurbishing workstations for the new folks being shoehorned into a rapidly-expanding staff. Now, my office was tucked away from most of everyone else--probably because I shared it with four servers and, hoo-boy, were they loud. So by the time I'd crossed my floor to the stairwell and trotted over to the far end of the lower floor, the problem had a good chance of fixing itself. Memory/CPU usage had stopped spiking, a file lock had been relinquished, whatever.
Being Upper Midwesterners, my co-workers would typically apologise profusely for "bugging" me, typically after swearing up and down that the problem had been there just a minute ago, really-and-for-true.
That's Sys. Admin. karma. The phenomenon is not limited to I/T of course--as anyone who has had their car's disconcerting squeak/rattle disappear on the way to the mechanic can attest.
When I changed jobs back to developer, I was spoiled for several years by having The Sys. Admin. Who Walks on Water there. But for my own projects, particularly after going freelance, I'm pretty much on my own. So it was today after I was fresh off a status call with a client. We'd both noticed that there'd been no actionable traffic to/from his web app. That's weird for a Monday. But then again, it's a slow week in the U.S. due to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Or so I rationalised.
For a short while.
Inevitably, paranoia got the best of me, so I logged in to peek at the database. Sure enough, data was still being crunched; it's just that nothing had tripped the required threshold. So I emailed the client to let him know that, so far as I could see, everything was cool.
Not fifteen minutes later, the app. spit out a couple of emails indicating action items.
It was pure coincidence, of course. (No, really. Pinky-swear.) Yet the human mind could easily translate the juxtaposition of me telling my client that everything was cool and the sudden appearance of app.-generated emails into a cause-and-effect relationship.
Technically, that's synchronicity.
But--is that necessarily a bad thing? From an outside perspective, I only had to log in, barely poke around, and the inscrutable Server Gods blessed the client with a couple of emails. Magic! w00t! Five points for Hufflepuff!
Problem is, the root of magic is the audience seeing an action (or set of actions) result in something seemingly impossible...or at least counter-intuitive. In the absence of complete information about inner workings, folks will construct their own narrative. Professionally, the magician has two jobs: 1.) Conceal the actual process between the action(s) and results, which includes 2.) Preventing the audience from forming unwanted hypotheses about cause and effect.
But since the days when we stared into the darkness outside the firelight in hope that the darkness wasn't staring back at us, our species has mastered few skills quite like narrative-generation. (Which probably explains why statistics--more honoured in the misuse than the use--have a bad name.) Thus, one person's magician is another's charlatan--or, worse, practitioner of the Dark Arts.
In my case, my client could suspect that I quietly fixed some bug under the guise of "sanity-checking" that the app. hadn't stalled out. And, in the face of suspiciously close timing, I couldn't in fairness call that unreasonable.
Right now I'm trusting to nearly a year and a half's work with said client that he doesn't, in fact, suspect me of server-side slight-of-hand. Mind you, I do still occasionally take joy in finding the magic in what I do for a living. But I know that I'll never have the marketing chops to peddle it. Then again, if I can earn that kind of trust from someone with a very different skill-set, that's a higher form of magic than anything I could coax from a compiler, no?
