You remind me of a programmer I heard about who was developing a big system and noticed that some of his daemons were unreliable. So he began writing watchers to restart things, make sure things got started in the right order, etc. And a few more watchers, some of which watched the watchers. And daemons of course would notice that their watchers were not up and would take appropriate action...

He eventually cobbled together a working system.

The machine rebooted and *then* he found out that he had managed to create a circular dependency among the watchers. There was literally no way to bring the system up without rewriting it! :-)