Christmas in the Server Room

It's the Holiday Season, so we're going to take a break from our usual content, and talk about holiday movies and TV specials. But we can't just completely abandon what The Daily WTF is about, so we're going to rate these holiday classics for the accuracy of their portrayal of the IT industry. We'll rate each on a scale of 5 floppy disks, where 5 has the documentary accuracy of Office Space.

A Charlie Brown Christmas

The story of A Charlie Brown Christmas focuses on the conflict between Christmas spirit and commercialism. The story contains no computers or IT professionals, and instead focuses on the annual Christmas play which the children are producing. In that regard, it's a story of a poorly scoped, poorly resourced project, with the actual responsibility for the project's success being left in the hands of unqualified children, while any sort of managerial oversight by adults is expressed as sad trombone noises.

Wha wha whaaaa, indeed.

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A Miracle on 34th Street

Kris Kringle, a department store Santa claims to be the real thing. He's committed to a mental institution, triggering a court case to determine whether he's dangerously insane- or actually Santa Claus. The "twist", such as it is, is that the Post Office, overwhelmed with all the letters to Santa, decides to deliver the mail to the courthouse. By this, it's determined that the Federal government, in the form of the postal service, believes Kringle to be the real Santa Claus. The case is dismissed, and Christmas is saved.

Again, there's very little technology in this story, but the postal workers thinking they have an easy solution to a hard problem and literally dumping it in someone else's lap is very relatable.

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Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

Rudolph, assumed to be "defective" because of his glowing nose, goes on an adventure with other "misfits", until his difference is suddenly useful: his glowing nose will guide Santa's sleigh through the snow. The moral of the story is that it's okay to be different- so long as you're useful.

This tale is the tale of the overeager intern, the one who wants to do the "real" work, and is overjoyed to be asked to work late on Christmas Eve, because they finally feel like an important member of the team. Painful watching, but sadly true to life.

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Die Hard

Vacationing police officer John McClane's holiday reunion with his estranged wife goes off the rails when terrorists take over the building. But they're not terrorists- they're thieves, and this is all a stunt to get them access to the building's vault.

Central to this plot is that, to bypass the final lock, the thieves need the FBI to cut power to the building. From a "basic common sense" perspective, this is absurd- of course you'd expected a powered lock to fail safe, not fail open. That said, we've seen so many wiring and electrical snafus on this site, that I have to grant it some plausibility. Bonus points for the sleazy sales-beast dying. Not realistic, but satisfying.

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Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

The Martian children are sad, so their Martian dad decides to kidnap Santa Claus. This creates a factional schism in Martian culture between the Santa-loving progressive faction, and the conservatives. The conflict is resolved when the dumbest Martian- named Droppo- decides to become Mars's Santa Claus, and Santa is sent home.

The movie is stuffed with robots, spaceships, pills instead of food, and of course the requisite 50s era "pushbutton future" where instead of making toys, Santa just pushes buttons on a Martian machine to generate them. It's profoundly dumb, but not as dumb as Droppo. That said, the dumbest person on the planet being handed a powerful position with basically no responsibility and answerable to no one? Painfully realistic.

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A Fairytale of New York

"It's Christmas Eve dear, in the drunk tank," begins this dark Christmas song. From there, we hear a couple fighting over their broken dreams, and broken hearts, with real genuine spite for each other.

Yes, we're drifting out of visual media and into song. While nothing about this may seem terribly IT related, we can see through the subtext of the song. Arrested for public intoxication on Christmas Eve, living a life of wrecked and shattered dreams? Clearly, this is a story of someone who foolishly agreed to push a new release on Christmas Eve. "The tests passed, what could go wrong dear?" might as well be a line in the song.

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Jurassic Park

Three wise sages are called to attend a series of virgin births- the births of dinosaurs. While this Christmas movie breaks with tradition by not happening around the Christmas season, and not featuring any Christmas traditions, the characters of Malcolm, Satler, and Grant are clearly following the star to a velociraptor infested Bethlehem.

That this entire automated park has one IT professional, and that this IT professional is disgruntled, underpaid, and no one in management seems to care? Said IT professional has all the keys to the kingdom and can do anything he wants with the infrastructure, because management is entirely absent and incompetent? This movie is practically a documentary.

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