Murphy's Law Applied To IT

When you're on call, there's large swathes of time – literally hours and hours that go by, where no one calls. Nothing's broken, and the business is chugging away at full steam.

However, if that burrito you ate for lunch suddenly needs to make an exit, you can guarantee there will be a network outage at that exact moment.

When you need ten minutes to get your child to the school bus stop by 7am, your servers will sense this and burst into flames.

If you run to the shop for milk - only five minutes down the road - the database will eat itself.

On the other hand, maybe you've had an extremely busy on call week. Maybe you've been awake for 48 hours straight, and those fluffy, bunny-like spiders crawling up your arm don't want to listen to Kylie Minogue on their very tiny iPods anymore. You need sleep.

Five minutes after settling into a cozy cocoon on the couch for a power nap, your cell phone rings. It will be the crisis team informing you that every user on the East Coast can't log in.