Hooray — another zero-day patch! The financial sky is falling! The only good news is I'm used to hedge fund managers throwing themselves out the windows. If you're as familiar with zero-day patches as collateralized debt obligations, let me explain the difference to an IT guy. A CDO means I'm fired. A zero-day patch means I'm working. All weekend.A zero-day patch is a security alert that's been issued for some major, Internet-threatening bug, one that's so serious that they give people zero days of warning. It means the bad guys know about it. It's so bad that it needs to be fixed right away, I get that. But do you think IT departments are staffed for one zero-day patch over another? Of course not. Your infrastructure doesn't scale, but who cares? And why pay for all that automation? We have people here. Or in Bangalore, or somewhere. But when an operation takes 10 minutes per machine, multiplied by hundreds of servers and thousands of workstations for millions of customers ... well, I'll get complaints about the overtime charges, but my managers already told me they didn't want to pay to configure the automated solution. See? I can't win, even if Arista replaces every Cisco box on the network. The bright side: This morning, I worried I'd be out of a job by noon. Thanks to Microsoft, I now have another life-or-death upgrade to install. I'll do it this weekend. I may not have a family life, but I have a job.