Six IT Horror Stories to Haunt Your Next Quiet Shift

This Halloween, the scariest things look surprisingly familiar.

Nobody heard chains rattling in the machine room. No blood dripped from the console. The overnight dashboard looked reassuringly green.

Then the phone rang.

The following short horror stories are a combination of fiction, reality, and somewhere in between. Any resemblance to a particularly unpleasant Tuesday is between you and your incident log.

1. The Ghost Job

I found a batch job with no owner, no documentation, and a name that meant nothing to anyone. It ran every Friday in less than a second.

After a month of asking around, I submitted the change to retire it.

Monday morning, payroll called. The job created one small file. That file told the next system which employees to pay.

I have never called anything “just a housekeeping job” again.

2. Hot and Cold

On a Friday, our CEO broke the lock on the server room thermostat and raised the temperature from 21°C to 41°C, so the company could “save on expensive German electricity.”

Two hours later, three of our eight servers were cooked. That’s also when the CEO discovered he’d ordered a cooling-and-heating system instead of cooling alone when he installed it a year earlier.

—Adapted from https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin

3. Call Dennis

I opened the recovery runbook at 2:13 a.m., grateful that someone had documented the procedure.

Step one: “Call Dennis before proceeding.”

I searched the company directory. Nothing. I asked around. At last, an old colleague found Dennis’ number. I called and left a message explaining the outage.

He called back while we were still staring listlessly at the console.

“I retired six years ago,” he said. “Did you ever fix that?”

“Fix what?”

4. Everything Came Back

I restored the mainframe to midnight. The distributed team recovered the payment gateway to 1 a.m. Both teams reported success. Then I watched the reconciliation exceptions climb.

Some payments had left the gateway but no longer existed in our records. Others sat ready to send again. The business asked when processing could resume.

I looked at two healthy systems and realized I couldn’t give them an answer.

5. Server Room of Horror

One day, our virtual machines were running slowly. So I called Dave, a random guy at our IT service, and asked him what he thought. He told me to check the server room and see if the servers themselves were overheating.

So I headed to the downstairs broom closet and opened it up; what I saw amazed me. There were three servers. The first thing I noticed was that the room was about 100 degrees F and really humid. I thought to myself, “There’s the problem,” but that isn’t even the worst.

Pushpin boards covered all the walls, and they still had live wires attached and left hanging. A spiderweb of Ethernet cable looked like it shouldn’t even work. A shelf of CLEANING SUPPLIES sat above everything.

But in the middle of the giant web of cabling mess was the sketchiest table I have ever seen. Sitting on that table was a 30-year-old monitor that must have come with the building, along with a keyboard and mouse for direct access to the server.

‘Where are the servers?’ you might be asking. They’re sitting on top of the monitor. Not in a rack. Not fastened down. Sitting on top of a piece of wood on the monitor.

I stood there in shock for a minute before returning to Dave on the phone. I just told him, “You need to see this”. So I called him and took my laptop downstairs to the server closet. I turned the webcam to face the room and just said: “This could be the problem.”

—Adapted from: The server room of horror : r/talesfromtechsupport

6. What’s that smell?

I worked at a client site where their server room had a sewer pipe under the raised flooring.

One day the drains blocked and popped off the cover on the sewer pipe. Raw sewage was found under the raised flooring, and it blew the electrics. There was no infrastructure in place, meaning the business was on its knees.

The client quickly got in a waste disposal team and an electrician. The server room was finally working again 8 hours later, but the smell lasted for a very long time.

—Adapted from What are your REAL IT horror stories? : r/sysadmin

Before the Next Quiet Shift

Each nightmare begins with something ordinary: a small job, a thermostat, a familiar instruction, a successful restore, a storage closet, a hidden pipe.

The dashboard glows. The servers hum. Somewhere, a job nobody understands runs every day, and a recovery plan still says to call Dennis.

Want more? Read Uwe Graf’s Thoughts from a Mainframe on Halloween.