8 ways to scare the hell out of a system administrator

You can't scare system administrators with painted pumpkins or Halloween costumes. There are much scarier things to hear, like the phrase, "I've been doing a little file cleanup."

Here are a few scary situations that have scared the hell out of admins. If you work with a sysadmin, remember to never do these things =)

Some colleagues reported that the server room went very quiet and warm.

This phrase is enough to make the sysadmin put aside his morning coffee and scramble to the server room thinking, "As long as it’s not an air conditioner. And not a power supply. And not both at once."

The message "Server won't turn on 🤷" appears

Nothing scares an admin more than a complete lack of details. "Server won't turn on" is like telling a doctor, "I have some pain, but I can't say where." And adding the shrug emoji is sure to drive the admin into a panic.

"I cleaned the system of unnecessary files, including System32."

This is the easiest way to make an admin drink a bottle of whiskey or slam a pack of Validol. A user might just want to delete some files "to speed up the system" but it turns out that there's something vital in their list of “superfluous” stuff. Such situations give admins chronic nervous tics.

"We decided to deploy on Friday night."

"Let's do the deploy now, it'll only take 10 minutes" is the most terrifying phrase your boss can make on Friday. In the IT world, "About 10 minutes" is like "One more level then sleep" for gamers: you could be there till the sun comes up.

The user decided to "help out a little" and installed some handy free software from "1337.download.best".

Imagine a user bypassing all the security systems and installing some software from a suspicious site. Got goosebumps?

You get a call from your security service: "Someone made a request to the database from an IP in Afghanistan."

Hearing this can make an admin forget to breathe. Sure, all the data will be safe, but a flood of thoughts begins: "Why Afghanistan?" and "What other surprises are on the way?"

You discover that there have been no backups for the last 30 days

Not for the faint of heart. For a sysadmin, backups are like a first aid kit in a car. It should always be there, but it's better if you never need it.

You run rsync and get the wrong IP address

You start copying data, but you mistakenly enter a production database instead of a test server. "Just one digit," you think as the system starts to slowly die, and the complaints from coworkers start coming in that the server is down. At this point, you want to find a secluded place to pretend to be a bush and not have to explain why the test team has decided to "hang out" at production.

Some advice: if you want to maintain good relations with sysadmins (and access to the Internet), better not test their nerves. And if you do want to fray your sysadmin's nerves, get ready for them to take revenge and for long stories about viruses that "literally ate reports before their eyes" or backups that "disappeared during the full moon."

What's the scariest situation you've ever had at work?