by Ariela
On days when you need help remembering how to take a deep breath and not take a baseball bat to all the machines in sight, it helps to have this Tech Serenity Prayer at your desk.
How it Came to Be
As with almost all of my art, the inspiration for this piece came from something that happened to me. In my day job I do tech stuff for a non-profit. I describe it as "playing a programmer on TV" - I don't actually do any programming, but I am the admin of a bunch of the applications we use. Recently one crashed and burned in ways that I don't want to relive in the course of this blog post, but it was offline for an unconscionably long time. I've never heard Support use the terms "dangit" and "horrified fascination" in consumer-facing correspondence before.
Some time during this fiasco, I quipped that I needed a serenity prayer for tech problems. Then I realized that there was no reason I couldn't have one, I just needed to figure out if "a hammer" or "rm -rf/" was funnier. After a brief poll of some programmer friends, I decided to go with the latter.
In the tradition of feel-good text, I used a Copperplate hand to write it out, but I put it in white on a blue background to reference the classic Blue Screen of Death.
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