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- Chapter 1
- The Original BOFH
- The electronic rights of the original BOFH are owned by DATAMATION magazine.
- 1.1 Genesis (Striped Irregular Bucket #1)
- I’m really bored. You know how bored you get when work’s going on and on and on, and nothing interesting is
- happening, and you’re listening to a radio that picks up ONE station on FM, and it’s always the station with the least
- records in the city, about 5, and one of them is ”You’re so Vain” which wasn’t too bad a song until you hear it about
- 3 times a day for a year, and *EVERY* time it plays, the announcer tells you it’s about Warren Beaty and who he’s
- currently poking, someone you’ll never sniff the toe-jam of, let alone meet, let alone get amourous with. And EVERY
- time someone mentions Warren Beaty, someone says that he used to go out with Madonna too, and have you seen ”In
- Bed With..”
- AND THEN, someone ELSE will say ”It wasn’t really about Warren Beaty, it was James Taylor” and the first person
- will say ”What, ‘In bed with Madonna?’”, and they laugh and everyone else laughs, and I slip out the Magnum from
- under the desk where I keep it in case someone laughs at a joke that’s so dry it’s got a built in water-fountain, and
- blow the lot of them away as a community Service. I figure that I’ll get time off my sentence if I ever kill someone by
- accident who’s got a life.
- So visitors are getting pretty thin at the moment, and the Quick-Lime Pits are filling up rapidly, and all I’ve got to do
- is the full backups and maybe I can go home.
- So, to relieve the boredom, I get some iron filings and pour them into the back of my Terminal until it fizzes out
- (Which doesn’t take all that long, surprisingly enough), then call our maintenance contractors and log a fault on the
- device. Sometimes they’ll send someone who knows what they’re doing, but it’s a lot more fun when they don’t -
- which is about 98% of the time.
- So they maintenance guy comes in, and I can tell he’s NEW because the photo on his ID actually LOOKS like him,
- not like the head engineer, whose photo’s a black and white tin-type (he’s that old).
- Maintenance Contractors always dress up nice, with a tie and everything because they believe that a customer will
- trust a nicely dressed guy with their million dollar equipment *just* because he’s got a nice tie..
- Because he’s NEW and ALONE, he’s what you call an appeasement engineer, the new guy they send so they respond
- within the 4 hour guaranteed response period. (Things are getting better and better) Your average appeasement
- engineer is about as clued-up on computers as the average computer ”hacker” is about B.O, and their main job is to
- make sure the power plug is in and switched on, then call back to the office for ”PARTS”. The really keen ones will
- sometimes even take a cover off the equipment and pretend that they see this stuff all the time. I wonder what sort
- today’s is...
- ”You got a dud terminal?” he asks pleasantly
- 1
- I tell him yeah, and bring him into the control room.
- ”Which one is it?” he asks, confused by the fact that only one of them is smoking.
- ”It’s the Model Three” I say, giving NOTHING away.
- ”Ah, the old model three!” he says knowingly, without a clue what a model three is, or which one of the three terminals
- it is, which isn’t surprising, as I just made it up.
- ”We get a lot of Model Three problems” he says nodding ”So what actually happened?”
- Sneaky, but not good enough. I’m not going to point it out to him.
- ”It just went dead” I say, in luser mode.
- ”I see. Could you just recreate what you were doing so I can check the unit out when it’s ready for operation?”
- Very Sneaky. I decide to let him off the hook.
- ”Look, I’ve got to go to the toilet, there it is over there” I say, pointing at our Waffle-Iron.
- ”But that’s a Wa...” He says, then stops. He’s a beginner, and it’s just possible that the company has a line of terminals
- that look like waffle irons. He bites.
- ”Sorry” he says, smiling again ”for a minute there I thought it was a Model 2!”
- A reasonably good save, but it won’t save him. ”Huh, it’s nothing like a model 2! *THAT’S* the model 2” I say,
- pointing to the expresso machine.
- He nods and I leave, which means he’s got to take the iron to bits, otherwise he knows I won’t believe he’s worked on
- it. I give him a couple of minutes to get the element exposed then wander back in.
- ”So how does it look?” I ask, concerned-like.
- ”Well, I think we could have a processor problem..” he says concentrating on prying the element up.
- ..concentrating so much that he doesn’t notice me plugging the iron in.
- ”Shouldn’t you be wearing an earthing strap?” I ask innocently.
- When he thinks I can’t see, he creeps his hand over to the wiring frame and says ”Well, It’s just as easy to hold onto
- earth like this”
- ”But what about the risk of a cross-the-body shock with no resistor in series with you?” I ask ever-so-more-innocently
- ”Oh, it’s ok” he says ”the unit’s unplug...”
- BZZZZZZZEEERRT!
- click
- I ring the maintenance help-desk again...
- It’s Rhonda
- ”Hey Ronda!, Ah, I’m going to need another engineer and a new Waffle Iron over here; for some reason your engineer
- opened up my Waffle Iron without switching it off.” I say
- Rhonda knows me. It’s the third call and the third appeasement engineer this year. You’d think they’d learn.
- ”You’re a real prick” she says, annoyed
- ”Tell ya what Rhonda, why don’t you come and fix it; it’s a Model Three...”
- clunk!
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