I rewatched an old British sitcom about a basement IT department this week, the one whose first instinct to any caller is "have you tried turning it off and on again", and I laughed in the specific way you laugh when something is funny because it is true rather than because it is absurd. That phone line answer is a joke. It is also, depressingly often, the correct first diagnostic step, and everyone who has done a support shift knows it.
What the show got right was never the technology, which it cheerfully got wrong and did not care to get right. It got the social position of the job right. The IT department lives in the basement, summoned upstairs only when something breaks, vaguely resented when it works and openly blamed when it doesn't. That dynamic has not changed in the years since it aired. The infrastructure that everyone depends on is invisible precisely until the moment it fails, and the people who keep it running are invisible by the same logic.
There is a scene, and you will know it if you have seen the show, where someone treats "the internet" as a small physical object that can be handed over, and everyone upstairs believes it completely. The joke is that the users are credulous. The deeper joke, the one that has aged best, is that the IT lot are quietly delighted to be misunderstood, because being misunderstood is a kind of armour. If nobody upstairs knows what you actually do, nobody upstairs can second-guess how you do it.
I recognise that armour. I have worn it. There is a real temptation, early in a technical career, to lean into the mystique, to let people believe the work is more arcane than it is because the mystique buys you autonomy. It is a trap. The version of this job I have grown to like far more is the one where you explain things plainly, where the basement door is open, where "turning it off and on again" comes with a sentence about why that clears a stuck state. The show is funny because its characters never quite manage that. The kindest reading is that they were never given the chance.
It holds up, anyway. Not as a documentary, it would be a terrible one, but as a comedy about being slightly outside the org chart and making your peace with it. I watched it years ago as someone hoping to get into this line of work, and I watched it this week as someone who has been in it long enough to find the jokes load-bearing. The technology dated badly. The feeling did not date at all. Have you tried turning it off and on again. Honestly, half the time, yes, and it worked, and I am not even slightly embarrassed about it any more.