Nicolas Cage is not a tire fire

this man is a national treasure

The Case

Nicolas Cage has been in over 100 films. Some of them are among the best films ever made — Leaving Las Vegas, Adaptation, Mandy, Raising Arizona. Some of them are unwatchable. He has been in both categories, sometimes in the same year, occasionally in the same film. He commits completely to every role regardless of the script's quality, which is either admirable or insane, and the answer is both. This is exactly what working in ops is like.

The production infrastructure you inherit has the same properties. The component you were confident about fails at 3am. The ancient system you were planning to replace just keeps running, tuned by years of accumulated patches and the institutional knowledge of someone who left in 2018. The on-call engineer does not coast. They do not give 60% to the incident. Whatever is in front of them, they are going at it completely, with whatever context they have, on no sleep. This is Nicolas Cage doing Face/Off. This is entirely sincere. It should not work. It works.

"Put the bunny down" is from Con Air. "This man is a national treasure" is both a reference to the actual film and the sincere observation that the people keeping production running at 3am are exactly that. The National Treasure movies are about a man who believes, against all evidence and social pressure, that the treasure is real and findable and worth the effort. He is right. The treasure is the legacy systems that still run. The effort was worth it. You just can't explain it to anyone who wasn't there.