I rewatched a few episodes of The IT Crowd this weekend, the way you do when you cannot face anything new. I expected nostalgia. I did not expect it to land quite so squarely on the nose, a decade on.
"Have you tried turning it off and on again" is the joke everyone quotes, and yes, fine, it is funny because it works far more often than it should. But that is the shallow read. The bit that got me was subtler: the way nobody upstairs has the faintest idea what Roy and Moss actually do, the way they are summoned only when something breaks and otherwise left in a basement to be forgotten. The fire that nobody reports because the right form was not available. The phone number for emergencies that nobody can remember.
I have sat in that basement. Not literally, though the office did once put the infrastructure team next to the goods lift "temporarily" for about eighteen months. The show understood that most of the comedy in this job is not technical, it is organisational. The hard problem is rarely the server. It is the human three floors up who is certain the server is fine because their email works.
It has aged in some uncomfortable ways too, and I am not going to pretend it hasn't. But the central observation, that IT is a thing done to people who would rather not think about it, by people the building would collapse without, that holds up perfectly. Off and on again, then. Always works.