provocative maintenance n.

[common ironic mutation of `preventive maintenance'] Actions performed upon a machine at regularly scheduled intervals to ensure that the system remains in a usable state. So called because it is all too often performed by a field servoid who doesn't know what he is doing; such `maintenance' often induces problems, or otherwise results in the machine's remaining in an unusable state for an indeterminate amount of time. See also scratch monkey.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.