Never Touch a Running System: Charger Cable Held by Coat Hanger Setup

Description

A photo showing a laptop with a charging cable precariously balanced and held in place by a wire coat hanger wedged against the laptop port. The cable appears to have a broken or loose connection that only works at a specific angle, maintained by the hanger's tension. The bottom text reads 'THE SETUP OF PEOPLE THAT LIVE BY "NEVER TOUCH A RUNNING SYSTEM"'. This perfectly captures the sysadmin and developer philosophy of refusing to fix or update something that technically works, no matter how fragile the setup, because any change risks breaking it entirely

Common Tags

FragileSystems LegacyCode TechnicalDebt Workarounds Hardware Sysadmin TechHumor DeveloperHumor CableManagement QuickFixes

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick This is the physical manifestation of a try-catch block wrapped around your entire main() function -- it works, nobody knows why, and that coat hanger is now load-bearing infrastructure with zero documentation

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

This is the physical manifestation of a try-catch block wrapped around your entire main() function -- it works, nobody knows why, and that coat hanger is now load-bearing infrastructure with zero documentation
Anonymous

That's not just technical debt; it's a load-bearing screwdriver. The JIRA ticket to fix it has been in the backlog since the VGA port was considered modern
Anonymous

Sure, CI/CD is great, but nothing beats a 6-inch screwdriver for guaranteeing zero deployments
Anonymous

This is the physical manifestation of that production microservice held together by a setTimeout() that nobody remembers why it needs to be exactly 1337ms, but changing it causes the entire payment gateway to fail during lunar eclipses
Anonymous

When your production infrastructure has the same structural integrity as your cable management - one sneeze away from a P0 incident and a 3 AM PagerDuty alert
Anonymous

Immutable infra? Just screw it in place - no rollbacks needed
Anonymous

Our CAB calls it a change risk; I call it the stateful load balancer keeping five‑nines from becoming 0x0
Ølеґsîū 🪬🕍🪬 10mo

Literally my old laptop 🗿
ᗰᗩᔕOᑌᗪ 10mo

😂😂
@deadgnom32 10mo

but does this work though? it has only 1 pin on the power connection.
1. @sadok_spb 10mo
  
  the other one on the screwdriver
  
  @deadgnom32 10mo
  
  but it goes into vga
  
  @sadok_spb 10mo
  
  That's right. That's where the zero is
  
  @deadgnom32 10mo
  
  that's probably one of those laptops — which starts to add electrical noise to headphones, after a charging cable is plugged in.
  
  @sadok_spb 10mo
  
  Exactly
  
  @deadgnom32 10mo
  
  my professor for digital tech had one like this, and he loooved to show some meme videos while his assistant was cleaning the blackboard. he plugged huge speakers into his laptop and we all were instantly being hit by BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
  
  @azizhakberdiev 10mo
  
  one of my old speakers for some reason had both aux out and aux in, I became curious and plugged it into itself. The moment I turned it on, it became a siren
  
  _ 10mo
  
  Nice introduction to Larsen effect
  
  losiwo 10mo
  
  Do you know how to fix this? I plugged a bare usb cable to my heater to ground it
@adm877 10mo

VGA grounding?
@azizhakberdiev 10mo

later I realized aux out is for chaining speakers
@tuguzT 10mo

> see screwdriver > instant "Demon Core mentioned"
losiwo 10mo

I need something better 😂

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Never Touch a Running System: Charger Cable Held by Coat Hanger Setup

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