(Note: Silliness With Fundamental Serious Idea Involved In This Writeup...)
As in certain cults it is possible to kill a process if you know its true name.
- Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie
In alt.fan.dragons (Back when I was more active in the group, circa 1996, less often now), the Server Daemons - as the anthropomorphization went - were, and still are, the creatures most of us blamed when things went wrong, particularly when posted articles didn't showed up in other servers.
Most thought the Server Daemons were simply the things that were blamed for the mysterious disappearances, but we had to explain that not only they were responsible for lost articles, they were also responsible for successful deliveries of articles. Like, hey, give the hard-working critters a break, OK?
So the alt.fan.dragons bestiary was wider: We had the Inn, daemon that carried articles (though none of us knew its name back then) and Sendmail, the daemon that carried e-mail. And when they didn't do the job, they needed to prepare for trouble. Some angrier dragons used SIGKILL, but Hoki (the dragon I roleplayed as) used signals called SIGCAKE that turned the daemon into cake ingredients ("Segmentation fault (cake dumped)")...
Those silly old days. =)
Now remember, oh Administrator, that daemons are just hard-working individuals. Just mindlessly killing, uninstalling and replacing them when they don't do their job is pretty cruel - feed them with new configuration, respawn them, and praise their renewed condition in newsgroups instead... they deserve more than just curses when they are exhausted!