What actually happens during maintenance?

A thread at the official EU forums caught my attention. It started with a straightforward question from a player about what actually happens when the servers are shut down for maintenance, apart from applying patches.

In the replies there are a few efforts to give a serious answer to the question. There are suggestions that the Blizzard people do things such as restarting the servers, checking their performance using diagnostic tools, defragmenting etc. And I guess that’s the pretty close to the truth.

However, what makes this discussion entertaining is that most of the ideas are much more imaginative than truthful. I’ll quote some of them for you:

"I believe that Blizzard send a fleet of mechano hogs throughout World of Warcraft paying each mob and critter their weekly wages."

"They take turns to log into my account and farm battered hilt only to delete it afterwards. They do this to make battered hilt feel animosity towards me and never show up when it's me playing."

"It's so the blizzard employees can raid lag free."

"…And they keep trying to take back Gnomeregan but they run out of time cause servers got to go back up and they got lost because there is no map for the old dungeons."

"Maintenance days are the only time the hamster that power the servers gets time off. You wouldn’t take that away from him would you WOULD YOU!?"

A lot players want to believe that this is the weekly rest for the Blizzard staff:

"That one single poor GM ingame needs a break once in a while".

Quite a few imagine them shutting down the servers, going to a pub. Or maybe it’s just the opposite:

"*sigh* silly people.. nah the one and only true explanation is this:

All your suggestions about GM's and service team going out to the pub gettin drunk each wednesday are so wrong... thats the time they do things, theyre at the bar drinkin for the rest of the week, thats why most of the help requests you make at 20 are replied at 3-4AM - cuz thats when they manage to crawl back ;)"

And I couldn’t help loving the idea that they are sending out a squad of GMs of different classes all over Azeroth to put things right again and make them ready for another week:

• "Priest and Paladin GMs travel all over WoW universe, resurrecting bosses, using memory wipes on them so that they forget which players have killed them before so they don't know the tactics those players will use on them next time.
• Any engineer GMs go and repair the keep in Wintergrasp, as it takes a LOT of damage during the rest of the week.
• Druid GMs go round the world planting more herbs for herbalism.
• Shaman GMs go round the world manipulating the molten layer under the land's crust and bringing new metals and gems to the surface in the form of mining nodes.
• Mage GMs go around with the Priests and Paladins, summoning their water elementals to wash all the blood splatters off the walls and floors of the dungeons.
• Hunter GMs summon their special sheepdog pets and go and round up all the animals that have run off scared from all the rampaging adventurers running through their homes.
• Rogue GMs sneak round all player accounts stealing tiny amounts like a few copper coins, dust, potions and gems from those that will notice the loss the least and distribute them amongst various loot boxes and chests around the world.
• Warlock and Warrior GMs also travel with the other GMs that go round the dungeons, teaching the bosses how to be evil again and how to fight following the memory wipes.
• Death Knight GMs with blacksmithing again join the dungeon crew, so that they re-forge weapons and inscribe all the cool-looking runes on them"

Go and enjoy the thread! Add your own suggestions! What do you think actually happens during maintenance?