[Common ironic mutation of "preventive maintenance"] Actions perfORmed upon a machine at regularly scheduled intervals to ensure that the system remains in a usable state. So called because it is all too often perfORmed by a field servoid who doesn' t know what he is doing such "maintenance" often *induces* problems, OR otherwise results in the machine' s remaining in an *un*usable state fOR an indeterminate amount of time. See also scratch monkey. [Jargon File]