I studied Chemistry at University. The beer has killed too many brain cells since then, and I think I’d struggle to pass my GCSE. I do recall, however, that scientists were particularly fond of laws, and if you discovered something you got to name it after yourself. Boyle had a law about gases, for example, and Hooke had a law about springs.

Over the years, I have come to observe a number of fundamental truths in the world of IT that I thought I would share with you. Jones’s First Law is a variation on Murphy’s “If it can go wrong, it will”:

IT equipment knows that you are planning to replace it, and will fail a short time before, seemingly just to spite you.

I can detect the bemused looks from many of you. How can a server or switch ‘know’? Surely, it is just a collection of chips, wires and circuit boards. It doesn’t have consciousness or, for the more spiritual among you, a soul.

But my fellow high priests of IT, you know, don’t you? That Exchange server. You had the change requests in place. The business had been warned that they would have to live without email for 12 hours (a dangerous game given the global addiction to Blackberries). So, why did that server, the one ticking timebomb in your server room, the one with no documentation, the poorly-configured storage groups, the flaky backup arrangement… why oh why oh why could it not have held on one more week before giving up the ghost. And taking your weekend with it.

But don’t worry, I have developed a strategy for the avoidance of such unpleasantness. Keep your server in the dark. Never discuss impending doom in its presence. Throw it off the scent by commenting on how reliable its hard disks are, and that they’ve easily got another two years’ life in them. You see, servers are fudamentally vain. They all believe they can live forever, like that NetWare 3 server everyone had, that hadn’t been restarted in three and a half years (oh the heady days before Patch Tuesday). I tell you, it’s worked for me.

I just wonder if I’ve jinxed myself by telling you.

Photo: Jemimus on Flickr. Used under licence.