BASTARD OPERATOR FROM HELL #11

By Simon Travaglia (spt@waikato.ac.nz)

The darkness cleared as we got out of the tunnel and it occurred to me that
I couldn't be all that injured. Then again, maybe I was. Someone was going
to p..

I died.

Of course, a true BOFH considers this not really as dying, but more of
going home for the holidays.

Five seconds later, I'm getting the upside of 15Kv across the nipples.
(These ambulance guys sure know how to party).

THE BASTARD OPERATOR FROM HELL LIVES!

Three weeks later I'm back on my backside and feeling rested and relaxed
behind the console again. The rest has done me good, I feel great!. I catch
up on everyone's email then let the students know I'm back by performing an
impromptu preventative maintenance in the middle of lab time by kicking the
restart switch (They love it really)

I flip today's excuse card, "GLOBAL WARMING" YES YES YES! What a welcome
home!

It's the end of the month so all those automatic email reminder programs
will be sending messages all over the place. I set the system clock back 7
days to buy some peace and quiet and swap the printer ribbon for the three
year old one with holes in it.

I sort through my snail mail and crack open the BOFH Monthly Newsletter,
"kill -9" and check out the articles therein. There's a nice peice on
making OS/2 slow, boring and painful, but it looks exactly like the OS/2
installation instructions to me... Ah, who knows. I head straight to the
BOFH Wizard section to see if any of my articles were published. All of
them!!! Even the one about the c compiler that randomly removes one line
from the source code it's compiling!

The phone rings.

"The Screen on my PC is blank!!!"

"It's the power cord" I say

"No, I checked that. When I switch it on, it does nothing!"

"It's the power cord" I say

"No, I checked and it's all plugged in properly. There's no lights on the
keyboard or anything"

"It's the power cord" I say

"Oh. I just noticed, the cord's not plugged in properly!"

"The power cord?" I ask

"Yes... Woopsy"

"No worries at all" I say "Is it all working well now?"

"Yes, I think so. I'm sorry, you WERE right all along"

"Yes, we're getting a lot of this, it's due to the current Global Warming
problem. It causes random thermal expansion and contraction resulting in
temperature induced movement of friction based holding mechanisms.."

I listen carefully. Nothing. In other words, ...

"You can fix it permanently though" I say

"Really? How?"

"Well it's all to do with lowering salt deposits on the metal contacts"

"Oh!" (Dummy mode irrevocably engaged)

"All you need to do is just take the power plug out and deposit some dilute
mineral salts on it. Do you have some dilute mineral salts on you?"

"Uh, no?"

"Ok, no worries, just stick it in your mouth drool into it. But make sure
you wipe the plug first to get rid of any germs, and TURN THE SWITCH OFF ON
THE MONITOR before you do - we don't want a nasty accident!

"Oh. Ok!"

>Fzzzt< >clunk!<

I hang up as the receiver hits the floor. Disk space is too good for them.