In a prior work life, we’d worked with a young man who was seriously overvalued by management. They thought that he was a genius who could do no wrong.

At the time, he was the lone techie in charge of the Storage Area Network (SAN). He’d often regale us with stories of his skills which left us doubtful.

He’d tell us that he’d routinely get called in the middle of the night because “something” went awry. Apparently, he’d fix the issue from his laptop in bed. We suspected that the quality of his work in bed is why he kept getting calls.

I experienced the quality of his work one day when he approached me about an issue with a Unix server. He wasn’t able to log on to the server and instead of asking for help, he just powered the server off and on.

This was unfortunate because unix at the time didn’t like that. When it tried to come back up, it displayed messages indicating that it had been disgracefully restarted and that you’d better run the ‘fsck’ command and pray to your favorite diety that it recovers the disk drives that you treated so poorly.

I knew what to do (most unix admins do) but I was kinda pissed that he’d so casually sh1t all over someone else’s equipment. I ran the filesystem check command and everything was better.

After this, I christened him the fuck-up fairy because he was always running around waving his magic fuck-up wand.

The name caught on and folks hardly ever used his original name.

He eventually left for another company so that he could fuck up their equipment .