What's your biggest sysadmin pet peeve?

A sysadmin's job is never easy.

But sometimes, it feels like it's just a little harder than it needs to be.

We've taken great pains to build standardized processes, establish systems for nearly everything, document our work, and make everything we can consistent and automatable. Our work may be difficult, but at least we've been able to bring it under control and make it predictable.

Well, in theory. It never works out that way in practice.

No matter how well-written our documentation is, that's no guarantee it's ever going to get read. No matter how many cases our ticketing system is designed to handle, somehow it never seems to prevent the unnecessary drive-by request. No matter how much care we put in to ensure that code deployments never happen late at night or on a weekend, sometimes they always do. Something breaks, and we get the call.

Almost always, these things generate unplanned work, throw off our carefully-made plans, and cause slowdowns, missed deadlines, and, well, headaches.

To some degree, that's all just a part of the job. But that doesn't stop us from grimacing and wishing perhaps, just this once, things had gone according to plan. So we're curious: What unplanned activity irks you the most? We've listed a few common headaches we've heard above.