What is something you are superstitious about?

A longer piece of code that compiles and runs without obvious problems. It usually hides something horrible under the surface.

Made my hands sweaty just by reading this.

I'm in I.T

- we DO NOT talk about how On-Call should go this weekend. I'm probably jinxing it just saying its name
- we DO NOT forecast in our timesheet how much was spent on overtime, even though fucking H.R seems to need it a week in advance like I have a fucking crystal ball
- we DO NOT say Good Luck, really; not ever.
- we DO NOT throw the box away - nor the shipping box - until whatever part has been running for a month. And then in secret so it doesn't see us discarding the box.
- We DO NOT say "this is the reason. Now it'll work." You hear me, ChatGPT? You're killin' me.
- We DO NOT say "it's just a reboot."
- "Compiled on the first try" means "that's a bus error later."

I can't think of any more, but I think I.T people don't retire so much as just get afraid to leave the house.

Don't touch anything in production on a Friday

Of all technical professionals, IT people / sys-admins are consistently the most supersticious. There is a reason we put ramen on top of servers.

Co-worker: It's quiet today
Me: You fucking fuck, what's wrong with you?
Ticketing system: DING!

Or they have ocd.

I was a hockey player and a motocrosser. I don’t have blood running through my veins, they’re filled with superstition.

Whenever things seem to be going well, don't let the universe know you've noticed, otherwise the universe will make things absolute shit to 'balance it out'.

I work in 911 dispatch, and there's definitely something about full moons.

It's not that we're busier, or that the calls I get are more serious, but everything is just a little bit off when the moon is full. It's subtle, I don't think it would even be reflected in the types of calls we're entering, but a lot of our callers just get weirder.

Way back in the 80s a dispatcher I was dating told me that very often they would see a little burst of activity right during shift changes - like burglar alarms going off. She said during the brief handoff period there was often a slight bit of confusion, or at least not 100% efficiency, and that "the bad guys" knew the schedule and would time their actions to take advantage of this.

I haven't really noticed a burst of activity, but it's certainly occured to me if I ever turned to a life of crime that I'd do stuff during that shift change, a couple of the departments we dispatch for definitely take their time with it and there's often a pretty solid block of time where unless something serious is going down you're not getting a quick police response.

Some of them handle it more efficiently than others, and the size of the town is a pretty big factor too. I've had more than a few callers complain about how long it's taking because they live right by the station, but usually officers aren't just hanging around at the station, they're out on patrol and responding to incidents, shift change is pretty much the one time you're going to find the station full of cops.

Yes there is a correlation, its been studied scientifically I believe. It is also the origin of the word "Lunacy", because the moon (Lune in French, Luna in Latin) is associated with madness

It's always funny to me that people have to signal that they don't believe in magic before declaring that they do, in fact, believe in magic.

Cloud tax is real.

In astrophotography, when you buy a new piece of equipment you have to pay the cloud tax. That is: after receiving your new gear it will be cloudy so you can’t use it. The number of cloudy days is directly related to the value of the new gear you got. If you buy something expensive it can be months before you can use it.