🤖 When the Gonk Droid Overheats: A Star Wars Tale of Failed Automation Scripts
There’s a special kind of misplaced faith that comes with a script that’s “always worked.” It’s the same vibe as trusting a Gonk droid to power the base indefinitely or assuming the Falcon will definitely make the Kessel Run on time. Everything seems solid… until it’s not.
This particular disaster kicked off on a Tuesday morning. We’d just deployed a shiny new set of automation scripts to handle user provisioning across multiple VLANs. It had passed every test. It had behaved in production three times in a row.
Then, like a Gonk droid left too long in the Tatooine suns, the whole thing overheated.
When Automation Turns to the Dark Side
One second I’m sipping coffee, the next my monitoring dashboard lights up like Coruscant at night. Access points down. Switches flailing like malfunctioning battle droids. DHCP leases collapsing like the Death Star’s thermal exhaust port just got hit.
The culprit? One tiny logic error. A single bad conditional during a race condition. My “trusty” script decided to go rogue like a protocol droid that suddenly thinks it’s smarter than the pilot. No dramatic boom. Just a slow, sneaky collapse.
In my twenties, I might’ve panicked like a stormtrooper in a blaster fight. In my forties, I muttered a few choice words that would make Jabba blush and started damage control.
No Jedi Mind Trick Will Fix This
There’s this myth in IT that automation is like the Force — powerful, elegant, and always on your side. Nope. It’s more like a temperamental astromech. When it’s working, it’s incredible. When it’s not, it’s beeping at you in binary while everything burns down.
I pulled logs from every switch like a Rebel scanning for TIE fighters, dug into the Git repo to find the offending commit, and started rolling everything back by hand. A junior asked if we had a rollback script. I just stared at them like Obi-Wan watching Anakin ignite his lightsaber.
You don’t fight automation failure with more automation. You go manual. Line by line. Lightsaber to lightsaber.
After the Gonk Droid Meltdown
Two hours later, the network was stable. My script was not. Neither was my caffeine level.
I spent the rest of the afternoon building guardrails like blast doors on Echo Base:
Pre-deployment validation checks so no rogue script could slip past.
Stricter rollback triggers to yank control back when things go sideways.
More aggressive dry-run testing that mimics real-world traffic.
And most importantly, never scheduling a major change at 9 a.m. again.
That last one? Pure veteran wisdom.
What I Learned (Again)
Automation is a bit like the Force. It’s powerful, but if you lean on it too hard, it’ll flip on you. I still use it every day, but I trust my instincts more than a green checkmark in a pipeline.
Because when it fails, it’ll probably be on a quiet Tuesday. Just like the Empire, it always strikes back.
The Secret Plans:
Never assume “it’s just a script” means it’s safe.
Validation and rollback plans are your lightsaber.
Don’t deploy big changes during prime business hours.
Trust your gut more than your dashboards.