Heh - 'cause none of _us_ have ever done that, right? <looks around nervously for any colleagues reading>

It depends on what they meant by load average of 20. Or specifically, what kind of workload is it. In some cases LA 20 is pretty much standard, in some other you cannot even login to that box anymore. If it was the second case... well - since nothing works anyways, someone might just as well push untested code into production ;)

Although "One day the Sysadmin realizes" is pretty bad. They should have daily trends showing them it's coming days before it actually happened (unless it was some big release / marketing day).