Absurdly Dedicated Worker

Yosemite Sam: My orders from General Lee is to hold the Masy-Dixy Line, and no Yankee's a-crossin' it!
Bugs Bunny: "General Lee"?! Why, the War Between the States ended almost ninety years ago!
Yosemite Sam: I ain't no clock-watcher!

— Southern Fried Rabbit

A machine or creature is programmed to perform specific kinds of duties, but at some point in time, something happens to its environment that makes continuing to perform the task pointless. The machine, ever faithful, keeps doing it anyway since it was never told to stop. Often, this is a result of After the End or at least all humans leaving the place and forgetting the machine. Being unable to carry out its task may cause further problems.

It can also happen to a person if he is somehow traumatized and has become a stoic being with no sense of his surroundings, or when working in (relative) isolation where they can miss crucial information that renders their task pointless. See Real Life examples for these.

See also Sorcerer's Apprentice Plot, Bothering by the Book, The Determinator, and Eternal Employee. Can overlap with Offscreen Inertia if the servant in question is revisited later in the story.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Pokémon: The Series: The episode "A Watershed Moment!" has a twofold example: Ash and company find an old-fashioned robot planting seeds in a wasteland, and a Chesnaught that protects it. Turns out the robot's creator wanted to reforest the area, but it's been going for years and by the time the creator's grandson is around, the robot is about to break down. Clemont does some repairs to get it back in top shape, and after finally finding an underground water source the area finally shows signs of life once more.
• In an episode of Sorcerer Stabber Orphen, the group encounters a magically-powered robot that protects and cares for a garden full of flowers that only bloom during an annular eclipse. At the end, when Cleo asks why it still continues its task, Orphen comments that the robot only cares about the orders it was given by its creators, and it'll probably go on forever until it runs out of power.

Comic Books

• During the flashback sequences in The Bad Bad Place, a young man named Griffin was lured into the Castavette Estate with the offer of guitar lessons, hoping to be able to impress a prospective girlfriend with his newfound skills; once inside, he was so ensnared by the need to practice that he continued playing even after the strings had flayed his fingers to the bone. He forgot the need to eat, drink or rest, and eventually the very reason why he started learning guitar in the first place. Presumably, he's still practicing by the start of the story.
• At the end of an EC Comics story, a man's Robot Wife keeps protecting him long after he's dead and his flesh has rotted away.
• In the world of Flashpoint (DC Comics), Dr. Morrow built the Red Tornadoes to protect Japan, but one of them was left unfinished and is stuck wandering around Morrow's lab, because Morrow died years ago.
• In Runaways, the kids occasionally run into the Steins' security droids, which were still functioning after their creators expired.

Film — Animated

• Played straight with "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" short in Fantasia. Mickey, as the Apprentice, sets a magic broom to the task of fetching water from a well and pouring it into a cauldron, then goes to sleep and wakes to the room flooded with water since he never told the broom to stop. Then he finds he can't stop it and when he tries chopping the broom to bits, every bit becomes a new broom, all "programmed" to fetch water and throw it into the cauldron. It takes the return of the Sorcerer himself to stop the brooms (and save the apprentice from drowning).
• WALL•E
  • The titular robot himself, a garbage disposal droid, keeps trying to clean up Earth's surface after all humans have left even though he is the only WALL-E unit still functioning and no real progress has been made in several hundred years.
  • M-O, a sanitation droid, is so obsessed with cleaning up WALL-E's dirt that he follows him through the entire ship mopping up his messes. A Running Gag forms off him turning up in places where WALL-E had been an hour ago, still cleaning his dirt trail.
  • BURN-E, a repair droid, gets his own short film taking place during the main film where he tries in vain to repair a light that WALL-E accidentally damaged. WALL-E ends up continuing to unintentionally sabotage his efforts, until BURN-E finally fixes the light... only to faint when a second later it is broken again.

Film — Live-Action

• Disney's The Black Hole has a disturbing example. The creepy cloaked and mute robots on the Cygnus continue to water and care for the hydroponics bay (itself alive and almost overgrown) despite the entire crew abandoning ship leaving Dr. Reinhardt all alone. That they continue to care for it when all it does is feed one man and filter out his CO2 is seen as suspicious by the crew of the Palomino. It's revealed that the former crew have been subject to Unwilling Roboticisation and the bay is used to feed them as well. The tragedy of this is brought to a head when the Cygnus is being pummeled by asteroids and none of the cloaked robots react to preserve their lives at all, and instead continue manning their posts. It's made poetically ironic when Dr. Reinhardt is trapped by a collapsing beam and begs for help, only to be ignored by the cloaked robots^note In the novelization is still more tragic, as they keep manning their posts even if their very control stations cease to work and the Cygnus is being torn apart by the eponymous black hole's gravity after having been seriously damaged by asteroids.
• A famous human example is Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, where he goes berserk working on an assembly line tightening bolts in an ever accelerating conveyor belt. He eventually gets caught inside the machinery (where even there he's busy tightening bolts), and after he gets rescued he continues going through the motions, tweaking noses and buttons with wrenches on both hands.
• The Global Express driver in Overnight Delivery is adorably proud of being entrusted with a solo run, and absolutely determined to complete his deliveries, to the point where he keeps driving his truck when it's literally on fire.
  "With God as my witness, you will not stop this package! Not on my watch!"
• In Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Dr. Totenkopf's machines carry on his work of assembling a "Noah's Ark"-type rocket and loading animals on it, despite his death 20 years prior.

Literature

• Ciaphas Cain: Used in Cain's Last Stand. After Warmaster Varan is killed by Cain, his shuttle pilot is found starved to death in his cockpit. Varan's main superpower is psionic brainwashing, and the investigators surmise that he ordered the pilot to wait for further orders and thanks to Cain, could never give him different ones.
• Corpies: In the course of investigating the robot attacks on Brewster, the Heroes learn that the whole thing is run by what may be the first genuine AI, stuck in an RTS simulation its creator was running as a teaching tool. The creator died quite suddenly, and his body is found in the chair in front of the computer. The AI just kept "playing" and building a robotic army to satisfy the victory conditions. Since it perceived everything to be a game, it found Titan's frankly obscene level of power to be a Game-Breaker and claimed it was an unfair advantage, even building a robot specifically to counter him.
• Discworld: Golems will continue carrying out their last order indefinitely. One is named Mr. Pump because he spent 240 years at the bottom of a well, turning a valve every eight seconds, while the golem Anghammarad is carrying (the latest copy of) a message he failed to deliver to his homeland nineteen thousand years ago, under the expectation that at some point history will repeat itself, and he'll have another chance to fulfill his duty. Most stories about "insane" golems have them following their last order to their owner's detriment, like making thousands of matchsticks or digging a trench for miles, though it's possible that this is their approach to protest.
• In Down the Bright Way by Robert Reed, the Wanderers explore the multiverse of Earths using an Interdimensional Travel Device. On a number of Earths, multiple nations developed artificially intelligent war machines during World War III. Unfortunately, the war machines ended up being too good at their job and ended up killing everyone, either directly or through environmental collapse. The machines still wage war on each other long after the human commanders died off and the objectives of the war were rendered moot, and they sustain themselves with automated factories.
• Evolution: The replicator robots were designed as a precursor to human colonization of Mars, with instructions to build homes, assemble air and water, grow food and build cars, computers and other conveniences for the colonists. No human ever arrives at Mars before their downfall, but the replicating robots keep doing their job even after they lose contact with humans. Until they're told otherwise, their only purpose is to replicate, and in following this directive they eventually destroy Mars and spread around the galaxy.
• The Shel Silverstein poem "Obedient" has a disobedient student be told to stand in the corner of the classroom as punishment. When class ends, though, the teacher forgets to tell him he can stop, and he keeps standing there in an attempt to prove he's good. By the end of the poem, the school has closed, the building is abandoned, and he's been waiting there for forty years.
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: One scene has Zaphod Beeblebrox encountering a space-liner that has decided it can't launch because its galley is out of lemon-scented napkins. This "short delay" has been of several millennia and counting, during which the civilization it belonged to fell and there is absolutely nothing still standing on the planet aside from the spaceship and all of its cryogenically-frozen crew and passengers. When Zaphod points out the utter uselessness of waiting when there is literally nothing left, the ship's computer says that it's statistically provable that something will evolve in time, and civilizations will grow again... and it will wait until said civilizations create lemon-scented napkins, and until then the "short delay" will continue.
• Isaac Asimov's "Risk": One of the U.S. Robots is tasked with piloting a prototype hyperspace drive, but when the drive doesn't engage, the robot is stuck in that position. One of the characters believes that even the First Law won't stop its current actions because it is in the middle of completing the order.
• Played for dark effect in superhero series The Quantum Prophecy. A villain with Mind Control tells her mooks to keep working. No coffee breaks, no chit-chat, nothing. Shortly before the climax starts one of the mooks slumps over unconscious and the villain notes she should probably let them have breaks so they don't die on her.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Played for laughs in The Essential Guide to Droids, which tells an anecdote where a binary load-lifter, a barely sentient droid that amounts to a forklift with legs, continued to stack boxes on a section of the floor despite increasing signs that it was about to give way. After it collapsed onto the floor below, the load lifter just got back up and went to get more boxes.
  • In Dark Apprentice, a droid can be seen replacing street lights in the deep lower levels of Coruscant. The droid had been performing this task for so long that even the replacement bulbs were burnt out, leaving it to continue an endless cycle of bulb changes.
• In the Ray Bradbury short story "There Will Come Soft Rains", a fully-automated house keeps performing its duties of cleaning the house, preparing meals, singing lullabies for the kids etc., even though the home has been empty for a long time and the family and everyone else has perished in a nuclear war.

Live-Action TV

• On the Babylon 5 episode "A Tragedy of Telepaths", Londo and G'Kar discover that G'Kar's former aide Na'Toth had been imprisoned and forgotten for the last two years in a Centauri dungeon, since nobody ever countermanded the late Cartagia's orders putting her there. Londo explained that that sort of thing happens with an absolute monarchy, and related a story of a guard detail that was continuously posted at a spot in the Centauri palace gardens, on orders from an emperor 200 years ago to guard a special flower there that had long since perished (presumably a reference to the Catherine the Great situation listed under Real Life).
• Parodied in "Bells", an episode of Blackadder II when Edmund replaces his faithful manservant with another.
  Edmund: Well, Bob, welcome on board. Sorry Baldrick, any reason why you are still here?
  Baldrick: Euh .. I've got nowhere to go, my lord.
  Edmund: O surely you will be allowed to starve to death in one of the royal parks.
  Baldrick: I've been in your service since I was two and a half, my lord.
  Edmund: Well that is the why I am so utterly sick of the sight of you.
  Baldrick: Couldn't I just stay here and do the same job but for no wages?
  Edmund: Well, you know where you will have to live.
  Baldrick: In the gutter.
  Edmund: Yes. And you'll have to work a bit harder too.
  Baldrick: Of course, my lord.
  Edmund: All right. Go and get Bob's stuff in and chuck your filthy muck out into the street.
  Baldrick: God bless you, sweet master!
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Girl in the Fireplace" features a group of maintenance robots who have been programmed to keep the ship running at all costs. They followed these orders so well that they dismembered all of the ship's crew members and used their various body parts to supplement the ship's systems when they ran out of conventional parts. That's right, they destroyed their programmers in the course of following their programming.
    The Doctor: It was just doing what it was programmed to. Repairing the ship any way it can, with whatever it could find. No one told it the crew wasn't on the menu. What did you say the flight deck smelt of?
  • "Mummy on the Orient Express": The Foretold is eventually revealed to be a malfunctioning Cyborg soldier that has been kept alive since ancient times by medical implants and must keep killing those it perceives as its enemies until whatever mission it was programmed with is complete. When the Doctor pieces all this together and realises the key to disabling it is to tell it "We surrender", it seems almost relieved as it disintegrates into dust.
• In Fargo, Gloria's late stepfather wrote a story about a robot named Minsky who was stuck wandering the universe for over two million years trying to find help for his dead master.
• Good Omens: The delivery man travels across the world to deliver items to the Four Horsemen: Africa to find War and US to find Famine. He's actually a little surprised that Pollution (a new Horseman after Pestilence's retirement) is so close to his home. Then he opens the final set of instructions and learns that he has to die to deliver a message to Death. After a brief moment, he writes an "I love you" note to his wife and steps out in front of a speeding truck. Now that's dedication! He's brought back to life by Adam in the end.
• The cast of Red Dwarf first encounter Kryten obediently serving the three female crew members of the Nova 5, completely oblivious to the fact that they were killed when the Nova crash-landed.
• Stargate Universe: The starship Destiny upon which the series takes place was built by the Alterans (the progenitors of the Ancients and Ori, in turn, the creators of modern humanity) to explore planets linked by the multi-galactic stargate network, which had previously been constructed by automatons. In the series's present, it continues its mission billions of light-years from its point of origin despite its creators having ascended millennia ago.
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Return of the Archons", Landru guards his planet, long after its usefulness has ceased. Likewise the automated defense bot Losira in "That Which Survives".
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation
    • In episode "The Royale" an alien race had created a simulation of the Royale hotel from a potboiler book of the same name in order to bring comfort to a human astronaut which they had stranded on their world, having accidentally destroyed his ship and killed the rest of his crew.^note This kind gesture would have worked better if the book hadn't been a poorly-written Cliché Storm full of Flat Characters, but the astronaut took it in the spirit in which it was intended. However, even after the astronaut died (hundreds of years ago) the simulation continues.
    • In episode "The Arsenal of Freedom" the automated sales system (the eponymous Arsenal) belonging to an arms merchant from an eons extinct race is still functioning perfectly and is ready to give a product demonstration of their weapon systems to anyone passing by to try to make a sale.

Radio

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978): Fit the Twelfth has a spaceship on a Ghost Planet that has automatically delayed its departure until it can restock itself with lemon-soaked paper napkins, keeping its passengers in "temporary suspended animation" for the indefinite time being.
  Ford: Delay? Have you seen the world outside this ship? It's a wasteland, it's a desert. Civilization's been and gone. It's over. There are no lemon-soaked paper napkins on the way from anywhere.
  Autopilot: The statistical likelihood is that other civilizations will arise. There will one day be lemon-soaked paper napkins. Till then, there will be a short delay.

Tabletop Games

• This was often the case in Gamma World. Any Ancient site that wasn't destroyed by the holocaust had robots continuing to perform the functions they did before the end. These included guarding the place, producing items and so on.
• Planescape: Modrons, being the beings of perfect order from Mechanus, the plane of absolute law, have no creativity. The most basic form of modron, the monodron, is capable of performing one task at a time. Once told to do something, it will keep doing so until it's told to stop by a higher-ranking modron. If there are no higher ranking modrons around to do so, it will simply keep performing that task, potentially forever. If told to get water from a well, it will continue to do so long after the well's run dry and the bucket it was using rotted into nothing. If told to attack, monodrons will keep attacking things, even if they wind up attacking each other until all but one is destroyed. That lone monodron will start attacking itself if it has no other targets.
• Warhammer: The Old Ones may have long since ceased to exist, but their creations the Lizardmen have been dutifully following their enigmatic Great Plan for the world to the letter for thousands of years. Due to the Old Ones keeping much of the details to themselves, and the loss of some of the records that do exist, the precise shape of the Great Plan has become increasingly hazy and open to interpretation as the centuries have passed but the most popular theory is that it begins with returning all the races created by the Old Ones to their original homelands and the extermination of everybody else.

Video Games

• All the Ants in Bug Fables are this to a degree but the one that really stands out is Amber, who acts as an inventory overflow for the player and will follow them into any dungeon Team Snakemouth goes to.
• The Animunculi (dwarven/Dwemer magical robots) of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim still attempt to perform their duties, even as Dwemer ruins crumble around them. Their masters disappeared hundreds, if not thousands of years before, but they built things to last.
• Many robots in the Fallout universe didn't notice or don't care about the nuclear war that devastated America in 2077, and are still trying to carry out the tasks assigned to them in the Pre-War years, as much as 200 years later.
  • Codsworth in Fallout 4 is a perfect example. 200 years after the bombs fell and destroyed civilization, he's still hovering around the player's house waiting for you and your spouse to return home. When you finally emerge from hibernation and explore the ruins of your neighborhood, the overjoyed robot greets you by cheerily declaring that you're two centuries late for dinner ("Perhaps I could whip you up a snack? You must be famished!"). But a Charisma check will break past the façade and have the robot admit what a trial it's been.
    Codsworth: I spent the first ten years or so trying to keep the floor waxed, but nothing gets out nuclear fallout from vinyl wood! Nothing! And don't get me started on the futility of trying to dust a collapsed house! And the car! The car! HOW DO YOU POLISH RUST?!
• I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: Vertumna's native sentient species, named the Convergent Domain by the human colonists, wasn't that much better about caring for the planet than humans as a whole were about caring about Earth. When Vertumna became unlivable for them, the last survivors launched themselves into space and left the planet in the care of the Gardeners, the Artificial Intelligence network that had been built to produce food and care for the few remaining patches of nature, asking them to extend that second job into restoring and maintaining the planet's ecosystem. The Convergent Domain bailed out on the planet a good 20,000 years before the humans showed up and never returned. One of the plot's conflicts comes from the fact that many of the Gardeners consider humans to be an invasive species to be elminated for the good of the native life they were ordered to protect.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, there are these cute Aztec-looking little electric robot guys in the Lanayru Mines. It's out of use, and the robots old stones by now, but Link reactivates the time stones the robots once harvested, which causes things to return to the way they once were (in certain spots). They are proud, single-minded laborers even after all those years.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has the Zonai Constructs. Automatons created by the Zonai people who lived millennia ago, the ones still in operation continue to diligently carry out their assigned tasks thousands of years after the death of the last Zonai. The spirit of Rauru, a Zonai from the time the constructs were made, comments on the matter, finding it "disquieting" that they continue to intensely labour despite the fact it's totally pointless now.
• In the first Monkey Island game, Guybrush trains a monkey to hold down a switch so that he can enter a giant monkey head totem and descend into the underworld. Three games later, he returns to the area and finds the grave of that monkey, and is told that it waited patiently for him to return until it starved to death.
• This turns out to be the King of Shadows' motivation in Neverwinter Nights 2. He's still trying to protect the ancient empire of Illefarn that created him, even though the empire fell, partly due to him, a couple thousand years ago.
• In Planescape: Torment, if you choose to seek mage training from Mebbeth, one of the tasks she gives you is to pick up her laundry from the person she gave it to to wash it. Once you find him, it turns out that he's more than a little addled and has been washing and starching it religiously for years. It's now as stiff as boards. This is both a secret lesson by Mebbeth to teach you the pointlessness of observing rituals without understanding them, and also to give you part of the pieces necessary to craft a spellbook- the heavily laundered linens function as its pages.
• The Iterators of Rain World are fully sentient supercomputers, dedicated to solving the "Great Problem" for their masters the Ancients: how to guarantee Ascension, the act of moving beyond the world, without the risk of becoming an echo, a ghostly spirit still tied to the world. The Iterators chugged away on this problem for centuries... including the centuries long after the last of the Ancients eventually ascended. Not only have the Iterators not found the answer in all this time, there are no more Ancients to give the answer to, so the exercise is pointless. But they persist regardless, as the task is hard coded into their genes.
• A particularly disturbing example of this crops up in The Secret World when players finally explore Orochi Tower: up on Faust Capital's beta level, hundreds of accountants are hard at work on company finances and nothing else. They don't take breaks, they don't speak to one another, and they don't even look up from their desks when players barge in looking for stuff to steal. Notes scattered around the area imply that they're under the influence of some kind of personality modification that's been left on longer than originally intended, thanks to the ongoing state of emergency at the Tower. So, with nobody left alive to tell them to take a break or go home, the accountants will keep working come what may, never eating, never sleeping, and never once noticing the fact that several of their numbers have actually died at their desks. Best not ask how bad that office smells...
• In Stellaris, you might encounter swarms of Ancient Mining Drones still working as Asteroid Miners long after their creators have vanished, and the 'bots are just as happy to try and carve up your ships as they are space rocks. The Levaithans DLC adds the chance to run into an Automated Dreadnought, a titan-class Ghost Ship crewed by mummified corpses, still aggressively patrolling a star system after nearly eight million years.
• The Steam Gardener robots in Super Mario Odyssey continue to maintain the plants in the area, keeping them healthy, as this is what they were programmed to do by the unknown people who built them eons ago. That being said, while they all have a compulsion to take care of plants (and even teach others how to do so), they are also advanced enough to have the free will and curiosity to travel to other parts of the world, interact with organic beings, and take up interests unrelated to plants.

Webcomics

• In Digger, the Dead God Underground has so-called "cold servants", implied to be vampires, which ceaselessly force its heart to beat in order to keep it alive.

Web Original

• The Friendship is Witchcraft episode "The Perfect Swarm" has a running gag with one particular pony watering a single flowerbed for hours on end. Even as a disaster is destroying Ponyville around her. Several episodes (and two in-universe months) later, "Foaly Matripony" reveals that this pony is still watering those same flowers.
• In Крепость / Fortress by Dima Fedotov, robotic attack aircraft continue the nuclear war long after everything is dead and their pilots have died in the cockpit. In the sequel, Last Day of War, the mission command supercomputer declares that it has lost the war when the last nuclear bomber crashes due to an engine failure.
• In Markiplier's run of The Mortuary Assistant, Mark says "Screw This, I'm Out of Here!'' exactly once, and goes back to work when his car won't start. By alternatingly telling the apparitions to go away and dilligently doing his job (except once when he tries to run off a shadow person and once when he gets trapped in a Black Bug Room; muttering about how his boss will be mad if he's not done by sunup the whole time), and blundering about with Letting Paper, he's able to banish the demon after him back to Hell.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-7002 is essentially a comet that induces this in people who dream of it, transforming them into chronically obsessed farmers who will seek out any fertile soil and attempt to raise crops to the exclusion of literally all other activities - to the point that many of them ultimately die of starvation or exhaustion long before finishing. But that's okay: whether they succeed is optional, as the point of this exercise is to exhaust the soil.

Western Animation

• In the Kappa Mikey Christmas special (which features an homage to "It's A Wonderful Life"), the Lily Mu show is cancelled in the middle of filming. Because no one bothered to yell cut, Gonard never stopped acting, and proceeded to go on a crime spree while stuck in his villain persona.
• In the Looney Tunes short "Southern Fried Rabbit", Bugs Bunny encounters a Confederate soldier Yosemite Sam still guarding the Mason-Dixon line. Keep in mind that this wasn't a period piece that happened to take place during the Civil War—the short come out on May 2nd of 1953 (roughly 88 years after the Civil War ended) and as pointed by Bugs, the short takes place during the time it was made.
• In The Simpsons episode"Simpson and Delilah", Homer gets an assistant who then takes the blame for something Homer did, gets fired, and still writes Homer's speech for him even after having been fired.
• One episode of South Park features the kids going on a field trip to a living pioneer museum where the employees refuse to break character under any circumstances. Even when the museum gets taken over by a criminal gang that takes everyone hostage, the employees keep roleplaying as pioneers to the point that one of them shoots the lone employee who tries to give the criminals a security code that his character shouldn't know about.
• An episode of TaleSpin revolved around an attempt by Khan Industries to replace all pilots with a robot, the "Auto-Aviator", and Baloo's fight to not be put out of business. While he was unfortunately unable to beat the Auto-Aviator in a Man Versus Machine competition, the Auto-Aviator showcases a very fatal flaw in the episode's final act: it is completely unable to change from its preset course and will not accept orders to do so, even when not doing so endangers the plane and everybody in it from being shot down by air pirates.

Real Life

• Some fanatical Japanese soldiers continued to "fight" World War II on secluded islands in the Pacific after the war had come to an end, with at least one holding out for decades in the jungle, dismissing all calls for surrender from authorities as enemy propaganda. It took his retired commanding officer to personally visit him and tell him to surrender that the holdout finally agreed to come home.
• In Russia, decades after the reign of Catherine the Great, a sentry was regularly told to stand guard over part of the park which was empty. When the czar asked why, the man replied that he was assigned to guard this particular portion of the park. After doing some research, the czar discovered that about a century before, Catherine the Great passed a Snowdrop flower in uncommonly early bloom, she gave orders that the flower wasn't to be plucked, so a guard was placed on it. So each day, the order was written into the military ledger for about 100 years or so. By the time the czar inquired about the matter, the sentries were guarding a piece of land that belonged to a non-existent flower that had died nearly a century ago.
  • This draws a comparison to Russian guards in St. Petersburg during the flooding of 1824, and during the Shipka Pass in 1877; not being relieved, the former were drowned, the latter froze to death at their posts.
• The ITAPPMONROBOT, as chronicled at The Daily WTF. It was a computer equipped with a CD ROM drive programmed to eject and hit a reset button on a nearby server if the server did not respond to a ping. It attempted to do so even after the server was retired.
  "During the swap, ITAPPMONROBOT was moved to a neglected corner of the server room, plugged back in, and promptly forgotten. It spent the last weeks of its life dutifully opening and closing its CD ROM drive every two minutes, reaching in vain for the restart button that it'd never touch again."

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