The IT stories enterprise IT pros actually laugh at.
Volume 341, Issue 4 · 7 articles from 3 issues
A sysadmin outmaneuvers a printer service engineer using knowledge of service industry tactics and a bribe.
When an office printer develops a squeaking noise, the BOFH contacts support and quickly recognizes that the engineer is employing standard delay tactics.
The sysadmin counters by providing every piece of requested information upfront and correctly diagnosing the fault himself.
He ultimately bribes the engineer to swap printers between floors. The punchline is the discovery that the replacement was identical to the original.
System administrators fabricate metrics using made-up units and trendy excuses to satisfy management reports.
The IT team creates entirely fictional performance data, using Perl scripts to generate pie charts and Venn diagrams for monthly management reports that no executive actually scrutinizes.
They cycle through convenient blame narratives, from the Internet in the 1990s to Y2K, blockchain implementation, and COVID, whenever questioned about wildly inaccurate figures such as 117 percent uptime.
When the Boss notices inconsistent terminology in their fake measurements, the PFY responds with pseudoscientific nonsense about how Google treats undefined words, deflecting further investigation through sheer technical jargon.
A developer's Python 2-to-3 upgrade workaround stayed hidden in production for eight years.
Walter, a demoralized developer at a poetry and television company, faced low morale and incomplete Python 2 to Python 3 migrations across systems. Frustrated after a delayed job interview, he created a symbolic link pointing Python 3 to Python 2 as a quick fix.
The hack worked without triggering alerts, so he left a self-aware comment in the configuration script and moved on. Eight years later, a former colleague contacted him on LinkedIn to report that the symbolic link had finally been discovered during a Linux upgrade, having survived migration to Ansible automation.
The BOFH battles petty cash bureaucracy with quantum physics metaphors and a staged laptop incident.
This BOFH episode follows the IT administrator's struggle with byzantine petty cash reimbursement procedures.
He endures excessive scrutiny from a junior accountant over receipt validity, then invokes Heisenberg uncertainty to manoeuvre the boss into signing the expense form after orchestrating a staged laptop incident.
Once approval is finally secured, the petty cash tin vanishes from a locked drawer, and Schrödinger's cat provides the metaphor needed to deflect any accountability for the missing funds.
A Scottish digital billboard has been stuck on a Debian login prompt since its operator went into liquidation.
A large outdoor advertising display in Greenock, Scotland has spent weeks showing a Debian Linux login screen after 75Media, the company that managed it, went into liquidation.
The billboard runs at 1,200 x 320 pixels on Debian 11 (Bullseye) from 2021 and now sits unattended with nobody responsible for its operation.
With the advertising company out of business and ownership unclear, the display's command line stares out at passersby as a small monument to abandoned infrastructure.
A maintenance batch script meant to defrag Exchange deleted critical Windows NT 4 system files instead.
An IT professional wrote a batch file to automate Exchange server maintenance by stopping services, compacting the database with eseutil, and deleting temporary files.
It passed testing, won management approval, and was scheduled for Friday nights. Unfortunately the script contained DEL *.* without specifying a directory, so when run from System32 it wiped that directory and crippled the Windows NT 4 server. The administrator spent most of the weekend rebuilding and restoring - though he did collect double time for the emergency work.
An executive mistook a photocopier for a fax machine, producing a memorable tech support call.
A facilities manager at a UK food company was called to help a company secretary whose urgent fax had failed to send.
On investigation, he found the executive had been using a photocopier, placing her document in the tray and dialing a number on the numeric keypad before pressing Enter.
The confusion was at least understandable, since multifunction printers commonly combined fax and photocopy capabilities in the same machine.