The wonderful song
The Gas Man Cometh, by the inimitable
Flanders and Swann, describes a plight familiar to millions of home owners worldwide.
Sadly, in the world of computing, nothing is ever that simple either. Here is the fear that One Thing will inevitably Lead To Another, that Murphy's Law defines the activity of any who would effect repairs, with consequences only hilarious if you are not the afflicted one, as this filk parody demonstrates:
The Vax Man Cometh
Twas on the Monday morning the DEC man came to call
The VAX wouldn't boot -- we weren't getting VAX at all
He tore out all the cables winding around the VAX
And we had to call the hardware guys in to put them back again.
(Chorus): Oh it all makes work for the working man to do
Twas on the Tuesday morning their technician came 'round
He soldered and he tested and said "Look what I've found"
"Your ROMs are all the old versions, but I'll put them all to right"
Then he shorted out a cable, and down went all the Suns
(Chorus)
Was on a Wednesay morning the Sun technican came
He called me Mr Sanderson which isn't quite me name
He couldn't fix the server without our CD drive
And as root on the SG he typed 'unlink /', so we called SGI in
(Chorus)
Was on the Thursday morning the SGI rep came along
With his mini-root tapes and his manuals and his merry SGI song
He reinstalled the system -- it took no time at all
But we had to get the Next people in to come and fix the NFS
(Chorus)
Was on a Friday morning the Next man made a start
With mounts and exports he crossmounted every disk
Every machine and every directory, but I found when he was gone
He changed some IP addresses, and our VAX had gone!
(Chorus)
On Saturday and Sunday they do no work at all,
So was on the Monday morning that the VAX man came to call...