ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TICKET

Sysadmin humour

Sysadmin humour tends to start where the ticket description ends. “I didn’t change anything”, “it worked on my machine” and “just a quick deploy” can tell you everything about a shift. These are short jokes from the bar: a little affection for the systems, the absurdities and our own questionable workarounds.

For people who know that alert sound

Use a line in a team break, at the end of a presentation or in a message after an incident is resolved. The idea is to release pressure, not add to it. We’re laughing at familiar situations and our own habits. Nobody needs to be the punchline for the team to take a breather.

14 jokes from a sysadmin’s working day

It’s not DNS. There’s no way it’s DNS. It was DNS.
There is no cloud. Just someone else’s computer and your on-call rota.
It works on my machine. That’s why my laptop is now production.
A backup you’ve never restored is just a file with a good attitude.
Friday deploy? The bartender has switched to read-only mode.
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary workaround.
A user read the error message. Monitoring flagged it as an anomaly.
Coffee first. Then a root cause analysis of why there was no coffee.
The certificate expires in 24 hours. Sounds like a future-me problem.
Ticket: “I didn’t change anything.” The audit log ordered a double.
No alerts today. Yes, we checked that monitoring was still running.
The automation saved five minutes. It only took three days to write.
The documentation is up to date. According to the documentation.
Have you tried turning yourself off and on again? Start with a nap.

Why is it always DNS?

Because an innocent-looking name can hide a very long investigation. Backups, certificates and monitoring have the same talent: a tiny detail suddenly becomes the main event of your evening. If your team has one of those stories today, pick them a toast — or save the post-mortem for later and pull up a virtual stool.