Favorite IT Metaphors,Sayings and Aphorisms

In my Linkedin Profile, I write that I’m a fan of “elaborate IT Metaphors” yet, in a very literal way, I’ve never actually written a list of my favorites.

Listing out my favorite IT metaphors, sayings, aphorisms and such is risky. Too much pithiness, and I risk not being taken seriously. Too much cynicism and no one wants to talk to you.

And yet I must take that risk, because if you’re a practitioner of the IT arts as I am, then you’re used to engaging in these sorts of thoughtful/silly/humorous reflections.

Or maybe you don't but will find humor and value in them nonetheless. Enjoy and if you like, add your own!

Metaphor	Meaning	Used in Sentence	Origin/Notes
Dark side of the moon	Waiting for a host or device to reply to pings after reload/reboot	Server's gone dark side of the moon, standby.	NASA obviously
Eat our own dogfood	Applying same policies/tech/experience to IT that apply to users	That dogfood tastes pretty nasty and we've been dishing it out to our users for years	Not sure but heard on TWiT
DNS is like a phonebook	Computers speak in numbers humans speak in words	Look, it works like a phonebook, alright? Do you remember those things?	My own metaphor to explain DNS problems
Fat finger	A stupid mistake in perhaps an otherwise solid plan (eg IP address keyed incorrectly)	Jeff totally fat fingered it	Former boss/Homer Simpson?
Go FQDN or Go Home	Admonishment to correct lazy IT tendency to code/build with IP addresses rather than FQDN	There are to be no IP addresses listed on the support page. Go FQDN or Go Home, son.	My own
Garbage in Garbage Out	You get out of a system that which you put in	I can't make beautiful pivots with a GIGOed set	Unknown but s/he was brilliant
Debutante in the Datacenter	A server or service that is high-profile/important but prone to failure and drama without constant attention	Hyperion is doing its debutante thing again	Heard it from someone somewhere in time
Cadillac Solution	A high-priced solution to a problem that may require only ingenuity/dilligence	Don't come to me with a Cadillac solution when a Kia will do	My own but really…Cadillac…I'm so old
The Sun Never Sets on Infrastructure	A reference to the 24/7 nature of Infrastructure stack demand by way of the British Empire	And the sun never sets on our XenApp farm, so schedule your maintenance	I used this metaphor extensively in last job
Infrastructure is Roads/Applications are cars/Users are drivers	Reference to the classic split in IT departments	See here	Former colleague
Two Houses Both Alike in Dignity	Another reference to AppDev & Infrastructure divide in IT	-	My own liberal abuse of Shakespeare's opening line in R&J
Child Partition/Parent Partition	Reference to me and my son in light of Hypervisor technology	Child partition is totally using up all my spare compute cycles	My own
Code is poetry	There is something more to technology than just making things work/be an aristan technologist	Just look at that script, this guy's a poet!	Google but adapted by me for scripting and configs
Going full Fibonacci	The joy & euphoria inherent in a well-designed subnetting or routing plan wherein octets and route summaries are harmonized & everything just fits	He went full Fibonacci to save memory on the router	My own abuse of the famedFibonacci Sequence which honestly has nothing to do with IP subnetting and more to do with Dan Brown. Also applies to MAC address pools because encoding your MAC address pools is fun
Dystopian IT	Dysfunctional IT departments	I thought I was going to work in the future, not some dystopian nightmare IT group!	Not sure
When I was a Child I thought as a Child	How I defend poor technical decisions that haunt me years later	-	A (perhaps blasphemous) homage to St. Paul
There are three ____ and the greatest of these is ____	Another St. Paul reference	And then there were three storage systems: file, block and object, and the greatest of these is file	Useful in IT Purchasing decisions
IT White Whale	Highly technical problems I haven't solved yet and obsess over	I've been hunting this white whale for what seems like forever	Borrowed from Herman Melville's Moby ***
Servers are cattle, not pets	A pithy & memorable phrase to remind systems guys not to get attached to physical or virtual servers, to view them as cattle that are branded at birth, worked hard throughout life, then slaughtered without pomp or circumstance.	No more Star Wars references as server names, ok? It's a cow, not your pet labrador!	The guys who built Chef
Drawer of Tears	The drawer in your desk/lab where failed ideas -represented by working parts- go. My drawer of tears is filled with Raspberry Pis/Surface RTs etc	Yeah I tried that once, ended up in the drawer of tears	My own

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Comments

cahunt

"Screen Shot or it didn't happen!" / "Cap or didn't happen!"

Coming from the service / help desk / crazy techs do weird and illogical things - all of those WTF, and 'how did you manage that?' When Explained to another agent/tech they would reply, "Screen Shot or it didn't happen!"

Some times shortened to "Cap or didn't happen!"

jaimeaux

....aaaaaaaaaaaaand bookmarked for later. Nice work!

Bahlkris

The one we use around here the most "Technical Solutions.... for managerial problems".

dnerdahl

"oh-dark-thirty" is commonly used in our shop to describe a change order that needs to happen late at night due to business day impact.

A change order would 'be an' or 'scheduled for' "oh-dark-thirty"

markgosling

You can have it Fast, Correct or Cheap - Pick 2.

FormerMember

Packets never lie, people do.

I don't care what the vendor said, show me the network capture and we'll get it sorted.

That's a layer 8 issue.

We can't fix stupid.

Using Bits to solve a Bio problem / Using tech to solve an HR issue

Do we really need that new system that tracks employee bathroom breaks? Isn't employee time management a job for managers?

wbrown

Networks need 3 "eens" to keep running: Caffeine, nicotine, and codeine.

_____ is happening soon? Is that soon in human terms or geologic terms?

(one of my favorites taken from The Register) Total Inability To Support Usual Performance.

shuth

Sooo many times I have used "Garbage In, Garbage Out"

kevincrouch4

My helpdesk compatriots thought I was crazy when, during a meeting, I said that most of our helpdesk calls are Layer 8 (User doesn't understand the directions we provided and needs us to walk them through/ always forgets their password)

I've also said before that the problem is in Communication layer - user didn't understand the directions we gave

shuth

This actually reminds me of the following:

PEBKAC - Problem exists between keyboard and chair
ID 10 T issue - This one is usually said out loud rather than written down
H2IK issue - Hell If I Know...

dnerdahl

Oh man... don't forget...

RTFM - Read The F'ing Manual

kevincrouch4

PEBKAC and also PEBCAK. I'd always thought of it as the second.

If we were in a nitpick-y mood we could call PEBCAK problems with the user inputting things into the computer and PEBKAC is a problem with the user not understanding something? Or is that taking it too far?

kevincrouch4

I thought it was the Frienly/Fine Manual

njoylif

or PICNIC - problem in chair, not in computer

jwhite5

Don't forget the famous "blue screen of death" Or BSOD.

svindler

For personal support (like family and friends), I am still trying to teach them to use their mobile to take a picture

svindler

"Keep It Simple Stupid" or KISS, apparently from the US Navy: KISS principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

People tend to go "Ooh, there's a handle, let's turn it" and end up in a situation where the installation is so specific that no one has applicable experience

tcbene

Clear in house first. Meaning--Do a thorough check of your own area before you point the finger in someone else's direction. Used in sentence--Shop motto; Clear in house before passing the buck. Origin--Heard it from some old retired Navy guy, a marine (once a marine always a marine), and the Rock. Whoa network defender goodzhere maniel02

maniel02

awesome. lol

zackm

"Keep it Shiny"

During my time in the Marines, it was common to have Officers in charge who were not what you might call 'technically-gifted'. Moral of the story: if there are status reports to be sent, "Keep it Shiny" and only show actual critical events (hide warnings). Otherwise, be prepared for a 2 hour discussion on why things are not always green and how that's OK in the real world, no matter what the 2nd LT wanted to believe.

Jfrazier

SSDS - same "stuff" different shop , a reference to common issues in IT that you have seen in other shops.

Fat fingered - if I recall that goes back decades to a typing mistake as if you had fat fingers and hit two keys at once or the wrong key.

To me GIGO (garbage in garbage out) is a throwback to programming where you need to validate your input data in your program otherwise you get garbage in and therefore garbage out.

jaimeaux

As a former Marine, can confirm in the "Keep it Shiny" principle. We liked to call it "Officer Friendly."

byrona

In addition to "Packets never lie, people do" Logs never lie.

byrona

"Looks like a plumbing problem" = it's a network issue.

u1976turn

My favorite from a fellow co-worker not in the IT field, is "black magic". Anything she could not understand about technology is just "black magic" -- it just works.

netnewb

Put in a ticket

That's how we handle business around here because...

If it's not documented, it didn't happen

Self explanatory

netnewb

My former DO referred to it as "Wizardry"

dnerdahl

Does anyone else remember the term "ponytail guy" being thrown around?

Way back in the day we had an upper IT manager that used to throw out in cross function meetings "I'll get my best ponytail guy on it."

Maybe that was just him...

bondbane

Last year we retired our last server named for a Star Wars reference. That was an enlightening and hilarious article.

cahunt

The greats just let it flow in the wind, who needs all that constraint. I mean, except for a FW.