Summoning the IT bogeyman for fun and profit

We all know the bogeyman is alive and well in IT. He takes many forms, though he tends to follow erratic patterns of display, sometimes lying dormant for weeks or months, and sometimes taking residence seemingly forever. But make no mistake: He’s always ready to strike.

It could be something as simple as a desktop or server that suddenly refuses to power on or to boot properly, yet when inspected, it performs perfectly. Then it fails again for no apparent reason days or weeks later. Usually the only way to break this cycle and banish the ghost in the system forever is to dump the hardware in question.

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The bogeyman also lives in the wires, the nervous system of IT. Occasionally a link will go batty or a particular Ethernet port will shut down or a big switch will suddenly toss into the logs bizarre errors that even the vendor has never seen. These are episodes that we in IT chalk up to hardware failure, after we’ve dug deep enough into the problem to determine it’s not a “normal” issue stemming from a bad configuration setting or the like.

Naturally, the bogeyman is constantly pestering users, though he takes on vastly different disguises. For non-IT people, the bogeyman can be found in everything from a downloaded file “disappearing” when it was actually placed in the wrong folder or a mouse ceasing to function because it came unplugged or even the presence of the Caps Lock key, which manages to befuddle people to this day. These are the lighter, more amusing appearances of the bogeyman, but they don’t count in IT because we know where we put files and how to troubleshoot a “broken” mouse. Also, we’re well versed in the proper usage of Caps Lock.

But in IT, the bogeyman has an equally devious doppelganger: a manufactured, synthetic twin brought into existence when a problem is suddenly “fixed” with an imaginary solution. This mirror of the real bogeyman is immensely useful to vendor support services, which may summon him at the slightest provocation.

For instance, as I discussed briefly last week, software vendors sometimes invoke the fake bogeyman when dealing with a problem. Their method: They claim that because their software is running on a VM, all bets are off; they then cease to look further into the issue, regardless of whether virtualization has anything to do with the dilemma at hand. In those instances, they leverage the bogeyman as a trump card and throw the problem back on the admin with prejudice.

In other circumstances, the vendor might vehemently deny that its product is having or causing problems, while feverishly working to mend the issue without letting anyone know. Once the problem is fixed behind the scenes and again works normally, the vendor blames the bogeyman (and sometimes the admin), haughtily dismissing questions about how the problem was suddenly repaired.

I suspect this happens far more often than we’re led to believe. Data carriers are particularly susceptible to invoking this fake bogeyman. After all, they can easily make changes to their own gear without letting anyone know, at the same time disavowing they’re doing anything at all.

We do the same in IT, though generally for more altruistic reasons. While we may not all treat user problems with the same snobby air, it still happens, especially when desktop admins have to deal with pesky Caps Lock issues. But in deeper IT, we can invoke our own bogeyman when dealing with budgets and nontechnical management.

There are times when problems arise out of nowhere and present us with an opportunity to fix other, quasi-related issues behind the scenes. This is how virtualization crept into many companies several years ago. Problems arising from older physical servers were replaced with much beefier new servers running a virtualization platform, which allowed the original application to be rebuilt, but made room to replace many more physical servers before they too bit the dust.

How do we get away with it? It’s because humans have long accepted that the bogeyman is a fundamental part of computing. Rather than trying to learn how to fix a problem, many people will just roll their eyes and say, “It’s a computer — what can you expect?” and reboot the thing. This stems from tech’s ancient history when home computers were notoriously unstable — basically from Windows 95 through Windows XP.

Few other fundamentals of modern life are granted such leeway in properly functioning. We wouldn’t put up with a refrigerator that randomly stops keeping food cold or a stereo system that occasionally blasts Justin Bieber. However, when a computer has a “bizarre” issue, we tend to be more accepting, even if there’s no reason to expect a modern operating system to blow up in our faces like Windows ME did every other minute.

It’s like that legend of Bill Gates comparing computing with the auto industry and saying, “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that get 1,000 miles to the gallon.” The punch line: “OK, but who would want a car that crashes twice a day?”

I suppose that the bogeyman — and his fabricated counterpart — will continue to be part of IT for many years to come. Summon him while you can, because there will surely come a time when both users and administrators are less forgiving of his antics.

This story, “Summoning the IT bogeyman for fun and profit,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia’s The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.