Sysadmin Laws

Law of Diminishing Returns

If an email has 2 questions in it, the reply will come back with the answer to only one of those questions.

Law of Even More Diminishing Returns

If an email has a single question, with two or more options offered, the reply will always be yes, with no preference offered.

Law of Urgency

The time allowed for resolution to a problem is the inverse to the amount of time the user knew about their problem before telling you about it.

Law of Urgency Reversal

An urgent issue that requires any small amount of work from the user will suddenly reverse the urgency of the issue.

Law of Email Relativity

An email to a manager is like a space ship attempting a slingshot round a planet. It heads to the planet, disappears for an undefined amount of time, and then returns with three times the urgency that it left you.

St Peter’s Law

Any mass phishing email sent to company employees will result in at least 3 of them clicking on the links in the email, despite being warned not to, and at least 2 sudden phone calls from people asking, purely coincidentally, to change their passwords.

Sods Law

If it can go wrong, it will go wrong. At 5pm on a Friday.

Law of Two-Steps

Any Microsoft documentation required to solve an issue will always be for the previous version of the software, missing at least 2 steps required for the version of the software you’re using.

Law of Invisible Transference

Leaving a test machine in the hands of a developer will transition it into a production machine that’s not backed up and crashes 10 minutes before they think to tell you that it has been a production machine for 3 weeks and was not backed up.