While working on a dying solaris 8 box that probably hasn’t had a decent amount of maintenance done to it in, ooh, maybe 6 years, it occurred to me that in most companies you’ll generally find that the oldest, shittiest, cruftiest box also happens to be the companies most critical important machine.

In fact usually you’ll find that the machine is SO important that its never rebooted for fear that it’ll not come back again and the company will have to, oh, I don’t know, make do for half an hour while you fix things.

So I’ve formulated the following law:

The quality of maintenance that a computer system receives is inversely proportional to the importance of that computer system.

This explains why all internal systems that are critical to daily operation of a company suck. They’re just too critical to maintain properly.