Nice work. Lets add a bit of holistic consideration. What exactly is he trying to achieve? well, very simply it's a plural translation within english. In those instances where more than one system is down, he wishes to maintain a correct english sentence.

We thus minimise our code duplication like this (perl):

open(MAIL,"|mailx blah") || die "No mail stuff: $! \n";
if ($ct>0) {
    print MAIL "\n$ct ".($ct>1 ? "are not available" : "is down")." at
+ this time.\n";
}
close(MAIL);
[download]

But of course the greatest optimisation is always achieved by considering the whole problem, not just the perl:

open(MAIL,"|mailx blah") || die "No mail stuff: $! \n";
print MAIL "\nSystems unavailable at this time: $ct\n" if ($ct>0)
close(MAIL);
[download]

Silly I know, but to the point: Good optimisation looks at the whole problem.