I originally wrote this one to publish on Reddit, but also didn't want to lose it.

Many many years ago, I worked at a company in Canada that ran some financial services.

The owner was the kind of guy who drove race cars on weekends, and on weekdays would come into the programmers' room to complain that our fingers weren't typing fast enough.

On a particularly panicky day, one of the web servers in the pool that served our app became unresponsive. We had these servers hosted in a managed rack at a hosting provider offsite. After several hours of trying to bring it back, our hosting partner admitted defeat and declared that they couldn't revive WEB02. It had a hardware failure of some sort. We only had a few servers back then, and they were named according to their roles in our infrastructure: WEB01, WEB02, CRON01, DB03, etc.

Traffic and backlog started piling up with WEB02 out of the cluster, despite our efforts to mitigate the loss (which we considered temporary). Our head of IT was on the phone with our hosting provider trying to come up with a plan to replace the server. This was before "cloud" was a thing and each of our resources was a physically present piece of hardware. The agreed-upon solution was to replace WEB02 with a new box, which they were rushing into place from their reserve of hardware, onsite.

By this point, the race-car-driving, finger-typing-speed-complaining owner of the company was absolutely losing it. It seemed like he was screaming at anyone and everyone who dared make eye contact, even if they had truly nothing to do with the server failure or its replacement.

Our teams worked together to get the new box up and running in record time, and were well into configuring the operating system and necessary software when they realized that no one wanted to go out on a limb and give the new machine a name. President Screamy was very particular about these names for some reason and this had been the target of previous rage fests, so neither the hosting lead nor our internal soldiers wanted to make a decision that they knew could be deemed wrong and end up the target of even more yelling. So, they agreed that the hosting provider would call the CEO and ask him what he'd like to name the box.

But before that call could be made, the CEO called our hosting provider to tear them up. He was assured that the box was almost ready, and that the only remaining thing was whether to name it WEB02 to replace the previous box or to give it a whole new name like WEB06. Rage man did not like this at all, and despite being at the other end of the office floor from his office, we could all hear him lay fully into the otherwise-innocent phone receiver on the other end: "I just need that box up NOW. FIX IT. I don't care WHAT you call it! It just needs to be live! DO IT NOW!"

And that, friends, is how we ended up with a web pool of servers named WEB01, WEB03, WEB04, WEB05, and (the new server) DOITNOW. It also served well as a cautionary tale for new hires who happened to notice.