Bastard Operator From Hell

The Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH), in German about bastard / bastard system administrator from Hell , is a fictional character and at the same time the title of a widespread series of satirical stories by the New Zealand author Simon Travaglia . They describe how a technical assistant reacts his dissatisfaction and boredom to the often clumsy and dependent users.

content

Numerous German-language copies available on the Internet are overwritten with the following sentence:

Found on a New Zealand FTP server at a time when most of you didn't even know you typed K on computers.

At the time when the story begins, the operator is on the front line; they don't yet have their own help desk . An operator in mainframe environments is usually responsible for day-to-day work. He makes the backups , starts jobs at certain times according to the specifications of others, takes care of the central printer, is supposed to help the users, maybe sets up terminals and the like ( operating ). Higher-value tasks are usually carried out by system administrators, programmers and technicians from computer companies. The central hard disk space was very expensive and limited, it was usually regulated and each user was only given a certain quota. So it says satirically in the prehistory of the BOFH:

"I was an Operator at the University of Waikato, back in the heady days when" Helpdesk "meant nothing, diskquota meant everything, and lives could be bought and sold for a couple of pages of laser printout - And frequently were. We Operators had powers passed on the Technical-SuperHero. On one hand, we had the SYSTEM and root passwords, on the other hand we had the excuse "Really? I didn't know DEL *. *; * Would do that - I'm just an operator .." All the power and none of the responsibility. Good Times. You could do ANYTHING to a user and no-one would know. Well, they'd know, but they couldn't prove a thing. "

- BOFH archive

In Travaglia's stories, the BOFH is repeatedly annoyed by its users, with more or less meaningful questions. Out of revenge, and so that the users don't annoy him further, he tortures them - sometimes to the death. He uses the BOFH Excuse calendar as inspiration . A common type of ordeal is to delete all of the user's files. Especially if a user wants more disk space. The BOFH also ensures that the backups are unusable or non-existent. In the further course of the story he is supported by an assistant, the PFY (Pimply-Faced Youth) - in the German version PJ (pimple-faced youth). For a while, the BOFH operated as Bastard System Manager From Hell (BSMFH).

Derivatives

There are numerous similar stories derived from Bastard Operator From Hell . A German-language adaptation by Florian Schiel is the Bastard Assistant from Hell (BAfH), who has been making life difficult for his work colleagues in Schiel's stories in the form of a mailing list since the 1990s.

Origin and publications

According to his own admission, Travaglia, who was then working in the computer center of the University of Waikato , began around 1988/89 to write his story Striped Irregular Bucket at home on a Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 and to post it on Usenet at work . He got positive feedback via email and after a while he started writing and posting BOFH. According to the copyright notice on its website, the BOFH started in 1990.

On June 9, the first two parts of the "Bored" series came out, the second later also being called "The Birth of the Bastard Operator from Hell". Between June 10 and 15, 1992, the first ten episodes of BOFH were published on Usenet. On June 17th, the third and last part of the "Bored" series was released (later: Still Birthing the Bastard Operator ). From June 23 to October 20, 1992 another five episodes of the first BOFH series appeared.

These 15 episodes were published in the US computer magazine Datamation . From 1995 to 1999 further episodes followed in the computer magazine Network Week .

From 2000 an episode appeared almost every week on the UK IT news site The Register . Since 2009 they have appeared there at loose intervals, around 20 episodes per year. For a while they were also published in the British computer magazine PC Plus .

Between 2001 and 2005 Travaglia published the stories in five books. The stories from 2004 to 2010 were published as an Amazon Kindle e-book , as were the stories from 2011.

See also

• Dumbest possible user

literature

• Simon Travaglia: Bastard Operator from Hell , Plan Nine Publishing, 2001, ISBN 1-929462-17-4
• Simon Travaglia: Bastard Operator from Hell II: Son of the Bastard , Plan Nine Publishing, 2001, ISBN 1-929462-40-9
• Simon Travaglia: Bride of the Bastard Operator From Hell , Plan Nine Publishing, 2002, ISBN 1-929462-48-4
• Simon Travaglia: Bastard Operator from Hell IV: Dummy Mode is Forever Plan Nine Publishing, 2003, ISBN 1-929462-63-8
• Simon Travaglia: Dial "B" For Bastard! (Bastard Operator From Hell V) , Plan Nine Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1-929462-94-8

Web links

• Official Archives of Simon Travaglia (1992-2000, en)
• Stories in German ( Memento from May 30, 2001 in the Internet Archive )
• The Complete WWW Edition (1992-1997, en) ( Memento from June 1, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) in BOFH chronological order.
• Current BOfH stories since 2000 (en)
• BOFH Excuse Server (s) - BOFH Excuse Server

Individual evidence

1. ↑ BOFHArchive.com: The Revised, King James Prehistory of BOFH. Revision: 6f. Retrieved May 27, 2020 . 
2. ↑ Simon Travaglia: Bored Bored Bored , rec.humor, talk.bizarre, comp.misc, alt.suicide.holiday, June 9, 1992, Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
3. ↑ Simon Travaglia: Still Bored Bored Bored , talk.bizarre, rec.humor, alt.suicide.holiday, alt.flame, June 9, 1992, Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
4. ↑ Simon Travaglia: Bored # 2 (or Birth of BOFH) , rec.humor, rec.humor.d, June 17, 1992, Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
5. ↑ Simon Travaglia: BASTARD OPERATOR FROM HELL # 1 , talk.bizarre, rec.humor, alt.tasteless, alt.sex.with.furniture, June 10, 1992, Message-ID: <[e-mail] >
6. ↑ Simon Travaglia: BASTARD OPERATOR FROM HELL # 10. The final chapter , rec.humor, alt.tasteless, talk.bizarre, June 15, 1992, Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
7. ↑ Simon Travaglia: Bored # 3 (How to end the bored series) , rec.humor.d, June 17, 1992, Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
8. ↑ Simon Travaglia: BASTARD OPERATOR FROM HELL # 11 , rec.humor, talk.bizarre, comp.misc, alt.tasteless, June 23, 1992, Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
9. ↑ Simon Travaglia: The BASTARD OPERATOR FROM HELL # 15 , rec.humor, alt.tasteless, talk.bizarre, Message-ID: <[e-mail]>