Draft 0.2
"The BOFHen generally believe (and the facts appear to be on their side) that they are among the more clued and adaptable of Earth's inhabitants, and that any upwards evolution of the human race is only possible if the herds of lusers are thinned out a little. "
THE PHONE RINGS AGAIN!
"The screen on my PC is really dim" the woman at the other end says. "Should I wind the brightness knob up?"
At this stage, anyone who has ever worked as a sysadmin or on a helpdesk is probably banging their head on the desk. "D'OH!" they cry, knowing that their job security relies on them remaining polite in the face of monstrous stupidity. The BOFH, however is more pro-active:
"NO!" I scream. "Don't touch that knob! Have you any idea of the radiation that comes out of that thing when the knob gets wound up?!!!!"
"Well I..." she says, all uncertain.
"TAKE MY ADVICE!" I say. "There's only ONE way to fix a dim display, and that's by power surging the drivers."
The hapless lady follows the advice of the BOFH and ends up with her computer's power supply in the Great Hereafter. Only by luck does she avoid personal humiliation with a spare power cord. Here we see the themes that recur throughout the BOFH chronicles: stupidity, violence and the destruction of hardware. The BOFH motto:
YOUR computer's broken and I'VE got a problem?
In addition to the bibliography, a number of quotes have been taken from USENET posts. The names of the authors are deliberately obscured for reasons that will become apparent.
This first draft has not been commented on by real BOFHen. A second
draft is expected, with most of the idiocies and inaccuracies removed.
Character of the BOFH
The prototypical BOFH is a sysadmin for a medium- or large-sized company.
He or she will almost always be the most technically competent person in
the company, at least in the area of networking and operating systems.
At this point I should point out that BOFHen are not always male; female
BOFHen appear to form around 10% of the population on newsgroups such as
a.s.r. [6]. However, for the rest of this article
I will use the pronoun "he" to mean "he or she", mostly because gender
is of only incidental interest to many BOFHen. If you are offended by
this, you are almost certainly better off not reading the rest of this
article, or indeed ever dealing with a BOFH. In addition, I shall
refer to Travaglia's created character as "The BOFH", and actual
BOFHly sysadmins as "BOFHen".
The BOFH is into whatever will make him money, keep him in employment, obtain blackmail material over others in the company, or aid him in killing or maiming people who get in his way, ask stupid questions, or offend him by existing. Few BOFHen actually live up to this template in all aspects, which is perhaps a Good Thing. Nevertheless, the basic instincts are all there.
BOFHen do not suffer fools gladly. Indeed, their aim is to ensure is that the suffering is borne by the said fool. They regard Clue as an important property, and seek to impart it to those whom they deem needful. This may be done explicitly, but more often a Pavlovian behavioural system is established: "Whenever you call me with a stupid question I will delete all your files."
BOFHen may or may not enjoy their jobs, and may or may not admit to doing so. The general recognition is that almost all BOFH jobs suck, but the devil one knows (and works for) is usually preferable. After all, it would be a waste to throw away all that blackmail material...
BOFHen can normally be recognised by their attitude, even over the relatively impersonal medium of USENET:
In the simplest terms, you do not carry the familiar stench of not-particularly-well-repressed anger, cynicism and angst that the BOsFH recognize each other by. You have the chirpy piping voice of someone who is not quite smart enough yet.
-- SV
and their canonical appearance in Real Life is also distinctive:
And she points out the rest of the group, way the hell back in the corner, backs to the wall, with suspicious looks on their faces, and the air of being about to leap out of their chairs and do something messy yet satisfying to the rest of the human herd.
-- CJ
The BOFH attitude towards lusers is generally one of contempt and vague homicidal tendencies. Lusers make most of the work for BOFHen, and are accordingly unpopular. The high incidence of luserish behaviour gives most BOFHen a very jaded view of the human race. TF summed this up elegantly:
A huge proportion of people cannot make correct and accurate generalisations of principles. They have to learn everything as if it's an unrelated piece of crap, BECAUSE THEY ARE STUPID! PEOPLE ARE STUPID! YES, THAT'S RIGHT, I'M SHOUTING NOW! AIEEEE!! PEOPLE ARE STUPID!While there is the temptation to dismiss this as polemic, remember that BOFHen are in the ideal position to meet lusers who have been unable to generalise, for instance, what little they know about Windows 95 to their new experiences with Windows 98.
I trust Microsoft.
I trust them to be spectacularly unable to get anything right, including and especially hard things like industrial espionage. Sure, they'll make clownish, clumsy stabs at it and fail in predictable, amusing and embarrassing ways, and then do it all over again. And their victi^H^H users will not only forgive them but spend a lot of energy making up excuses for them.
Having said that, grudging praise of very limited aspects of MS apps is not unknown among BOFHen. It is however very, very rare.
Q3.1: Are there any OSs which don't suck?and GA was more specific:
A: No. See the hall of shame and OSes that suck
Eh? Linux is luserproof? What kind of "proper" set up is that, ripping out all removable media devices and ethernet, freezing the hard drive spindle, encasing it in concrete and dropping it off a pier?
Little compassion is generally reserved for the stupid or unadaptable: CJ remarked:
Goodness, no, they should not be allowed to die on the street. We have alleys for that.
You may remember that I posted something regarding Sun Professional Services. After a mild larting from my not-so-PH-boss, I am here to say that Sun Professional Services is the absolute Avatar of Computational Consulting Services. NOTHING they do could be improved upon.
And they absolutely do NOT take postings from the monastery and forward them to people you work with. Never. After all, why should they take postings from places that ARE OBVIOUSLY MEANT TO BE USED FOR BLOWING OFF STEAM, NOT FOR ASKING FOR BLOODY HELP.
It is hard to fathom precisely what the SPS representative intended to achieve in the above situation. Even a cursory perusal of the Monastery reveals its character, community, and extensive collection of firearms.
The technical cluefullness of BOFHen allows them certain benefits.
They know how to exclude web pages from (honorable) crawler searches,
prevent posting to a newsgroup by most unclued people, and anonymise
other aspects of their lives. In all this they bear in mind that
publicity is almost always the enemy of the BOFH. How this report
will be received by BOFHen remains to be seen.
The Monastery
a.s.r [6], also known as the Scary Devil Monastery,
is the home of much BOFHly discussion. Its
charter [7] lays out the purpose of the group: it is
intended as a forum for letting off steam, relaxing and sharing war
stories. It is not a tech support group; the imparting of
useful information (UI) is heavily frowned upon. And you do not want
to piss off its inhabitants.
Amy, I think you're going to become our official sysadmin's chum. In the secondary, particularly bloody sense of the word.
--SV, to an incautious newbie
a.s.r discussions provide a certain insight into the mind of the BOFH. There is a strong sense of community within the group, within certain constraints. Most notable is the astonishingly high signal-to-noise ratio; although discussions regularly ramble to quite an extraordinary degree, they are usually coherent and extremely accurate. Issuing inaccurate information or poorly-thought-out discourses is guaranteed to produce a small number of sharp responses, even if the originator is generally well-thought of in the group. It is notable that trolling on a.s.r. is rare.
The a.s.r. monks are very different people in terms of their interests,
morals and nationality; the key unifying factors appear to be the loathing
of lusers (and corporate stupidity) and a strong sense of property about
the group. Any attempt to disturb it, such as publicising its access code
or otherwise drawing attention to it, results in the extreme displease of
its residents.
BOFH vs Hacker
The prototypical hacker personality is described by Raymond
in [5]. Many BOFHen display tendencies towards
hackerdom, though the reverse is not true. One of the prerequisites
of being a BOFH is an encyclopaedic knowledge of one's networks and
machines; retention of such quantities of data is a classic hacker
property. It is difficult to assess whether BOFHen generally are as
withdrawn and shy as the stereotypical hacker; my suspicion is that
they are not, at least within an environment in which they feel
comfortable. BOFHen are by the nature of their job expected to converse
and negotiate with "suits" on a regular basis.
The distinction between hacker and cracker is an important one. The reader who is not acquainted with this distinction is advised to get acquainted with it before going any further into the nest of BOFHen. It is seldom that a BOFH will be a cracker, at least not an active one; he is far more likely to encounter cracker wannabees attempting to violate his system. His tolerance of this is usually non-existent. Having said that, a wide selection of custom backdoors is not unusual within a system that used to be maintained by a BOFH.
A similar attitude is displayed to spammers, the general agreement
being that the only good spammer is one with his ears nailed to his
genitals, hanging from the wall outside the BOFH's office with "Pour
encourager les autres" written in blood underneath. Bear in mind that
a normal user may be mildly annoyed by spam, but the BOFH will get
grief from multiple users for each spam that gets through the defences,
plus any associated problems such as filling up of mail server diskspace.
Spamming from the home of a BOFH is rarely done twice, intact
fingers being a prerequisite to sending spam.
Real BOFHen
The process of producing a BOFH is swaddled in mystery. The raw material seems to vary greatly, though a relatively high level of intelligence is clearly important. This raw material is refined to the steel-skinned BOFH through long hours, prolonged exposure to user and management stupidity, and years of wrestling with balky hardware and crap software.
I have been privileged to watch the development of a BOFH in the shape of my fiancée Jie. As a trainee sysadmin she has already started to demonstrate aspects of BOFHliness. Wiping out the Linux partition on my home machine by installing Win2K over it, rather than onto the allocated FAT partition, was quite a start. She claimed that it was an "accident" but I think that we recognise the hand of the BOFH here.
[An interview with a veteran BOFH may appear here eventually.
I live in hope.]
B.+FH
A recurring theme in a.s.r., mirroring the thoughts of Scott Adams
in [9], is that stupidity in the world is rampant.
In a telling point, the monks seem to realise that, outside their
limited areas of expertise, they are generally clueless. The difference
from a luser is this realisation.
FR recalls his experience in trying to acquire a U.S. bank account from a clerk:
Her: What kind of design would you like on your cheques?MS explained the difference between a BOFH and a luser:
FR: Pardon? <panic>
Her: What..kind...of...design...would...you..like..on..your..cheques
FR: I'm sorry I don't understand what you mean! <despair>
Her: WHAT...KIND...OF...(as if I was deaf as well as stupid)Why she didn't lart me with that folder of "500 Personalized Cheque Designs" I do not know. The concept that I could choose to have tropical fish on my chequebook was completely alien to me. She must have thought I was a complete luser.
I mean, we all self-LART to varying degrees on occasion. What sets us apart from the lusers is that we can pull ourselves out of the nosedive.
The concept of the BOFH is generalised to the B.+FH (with apologies to those who prefer globs to regexps). Hence the BSecFH may be found in some offices, with the motto "YOU'VE got a memo which has to be written by midday and I'VE got a problem?". A Bastard will generally recognise another Bastard, regardless of professions.
The key attributes of a generic Bastard include:
The first, and more important, category held the unnamed BOFHen; those sysadmins who struggled through 12-hour days, 7-day weeks, beating their heads against the brick wall of lusers and seeing no light at the end of the tunnel. Once they had encountered other BOFHen, life was more bearable: the Monastery provided a place to blow off steam, gas with like-minded people and generally chill out. Bringing technical queries or job adverts into the Monastery is guaranteed to provoke long hot flames from these people, and with good reason. The last thing they want is the intrusion of work into their playspace.
The aspiring BOFHen are more of a troublesome category. They may or may not be sysadmins; if they are, they generally lack the technical cluefullness that marks the BOFH. There is general consensus among BOFHen that anyone who actually wants their job is suffering either from appalling naïveté or chronic stupidity, the latter being more probable. Those pretending to be BOFHen when they are manifestly not are beneath contempt (though not necessarily beneath a good kicking.)
As previously noted, the road to BOFHhood is long and hard. BOFH
wannabees are generally not able to complete their journeys on this road.
For these people, the lairs of the BOFH are at best a source of information
on how to keep your BOFH happy, avoiding the dread <clickety-click>.
Summary
The BOFH is a creature of the information society, born of the need for
complex machinery to convey this information and of the utter inability
of 99.9% of the human race to understand or operate this machinery. He
may appear a savage, heartless and malicious brute, but these traits
arise from the nature of his job. Without BOFHen, lusers would very
quickly sink back into the mire of stupidity whence they came. So when
your BOFH next deletes all your files because you bothered him in the
middle of a game of Delta Force Land Warrior, remember that he's doing
you a favour. Don't thank him - it's his job.
Glossary
This article is released under the OpenContent license.