Once upon a long time ago I had some cron jobs that emailed me in the event of critical errors...

open (OUTPUT,">$some_file") || drop_dead("Couldn't open outputfile: $!
+");
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Another story that I wasn't direct witness to involved some HP server of some sort on some bleeding edge hardware. The thing kept crashing, finally they worked their way up the tech support chain to one of the kernel developers. He told them to add the following to the kernel boot options:

magic_fairy_dust=7
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The machine ran perfectly from then on.

/\/\averick
OmG! They killed tilly! You *bleep*!!