Perfection in Information Technology is like a sandcastle near the waves; it is constantly eroded by forces you can’t control. But you can rebuild.
“And so castles made of sand, slips into the sea, eventually.” – Jimi Hendrix
It’s the “eventually” part that gets me. It doesn’t matter how tightly you packed the sand in your castle or how tall you built it, the sea will eventually melt it. Build the sandcastle out of cement or even steel, the waves will wear it down eventually. Heck, build it a block away from the shoreline by the ice cream store, and eventually the ocean will rise and consume it. Information Technology works the same way.
If it’s not hackers breaking your nice new Information Technology system, it falls to relentlessly well meaning but undertrained users. And with those two “at bay”, there’s programing error and hardware failure. And just when you’ve got all those threats “shored” up and everything is running smoothly, the developer releases a new version which you’re forced to upgrade to, starting the whole process over again.
This is all fine because Information Technology “is a process not a product”. It’s a sadly sisyphean task. That’s why I’m stepping away from IT for a bit. I’m a product guy, so I’ll make a mobile app product. Yes, I know, it will be subject to the same inevitable erosion as IT systems, but at least I’ll control the version releases, so my carefully laid rug will be pulled from under me only by myself.
Perhaps a more appropriate song lyric is:
“Entropy, it’s a matter of course…
And your pathetic moans of suffrage tend to lose all significance.” – Bad Religion
Is any IT system safe from the tidal forces of entropy? Linux live CDs. Anything else?
Daily Analogy 
Except some COBOL applications which will be around forever.
Seriously, this is one of the hardest things to get faculty to understand. We have to constantly change things in IT just to keep up with the “tidal erosion”, such as moving completely to SSL once the FireSheep exploit was discovered. We went to SSL and some people’s bookmarks did not work correctly and we got complaints that we are always changing things. We always upgrade to the latest version of Blackboard so they keep having to learn new things (really we stay two versions behind the latest so that the bug fixes are all in place by the time we move to a new version), we also tell them to use a newer version of software product X, etc… All they do is complain, like IT is the bane of their existence.