The Trivia Quiz - BOFH-style...

The Trivia Quiz - BOFH-style… By Simon Travaglia Posted: 13/11/2001 at 10:12 GMT

BOFH 2001: Episode 30

Yes! It’s time for the Bastard Trivia Quiz!

Test your skill! Place your bets! Answers at the bottom!

General Knowledge

  1. You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Where do you go? A. N B. S C. E D. W E. To lunch

  2. Network utilisation figures are reaching an all time high for no apparent reason. This probably means: A. You may have to look at chunkier routers B. There may be some network card error C. There may be some network monitoring error D. Someone’s found the MP3 stash! E. They’re leaving you out of Unreal Tournament just because they don’t like fighting an invisible, invincible opponent with The Redeemer. The wimps!

  3. Complete the series: 5V, 12V, 48V, 96V… A. 127 Volts B. 0 Volts C. 24 Volts D. 1 Amp E. “AGHH AAAGHH! I’ll tell you what you want to know!”

  4. He who laughs last… A. Laughs loudest B. Laughs longest C. Is a prat D. Annoys the hell out of everyone E. Hasn’t seen the cattleprod

  5. Which of the following is an industry standard substitute for a SIMM removal tool? A. Nothing - there is no substitute! B. A screwdriver C. A car key D. Some pliers E. Banging on the motherboard with the back of your hand till the chip falls out

  6. A CPU can generally be clock chipped to: A. A small fraction above it’s rated speed B. 10 per cent faster than it’s rated speed C. 18.5 per cent above it’s rated speed D. 70 per cent above rated, with a freon cooling and a death wish E. 100 per cent, even more if it’s not your box

History Are you an old bastard?

  1. >Clunka Clunka Clunka< is the sound you would most associate with: A. The Clothes Dryer B. A washing machine with an imbalanced load C. A flat tyre on your car D. A tape safe door shutting repeatedly on an annoying user’s foot E. An imbalanced DEC RM05 Disk assembly moving around the computer room by itself during a head crash

  2. You drop a screwdriver down a ventilation hole in the powersupply at the back of a VAX 11/780. You expect: A. A very careful removal process B. A powersupply failure C. A nasty >crack< noise D. Power outage to the computer room? E. Looting of the shops in the two adjacent streets after the local transformer trips out

  3. The nine-track tape you’re using is having problems reading some very important survey data for some critical research - only getting half-way through the tape before failing. You would: A. Clean the read heads, which probably are dirty B. Have the tape sent to a commercial data recovery centre C. A, then reduce the temperature of the computer room, and try to complete the read D. Report the failure to the user E. Just cut and repeatedly paste data from the beginning of the data file until the file’s up to size

  4. The greatest danger to the RA60 removable hard disk media was: A. Not being locked into the drive spindle tightly B. Not being able to be removed from the drive spindle after use C. Disk damage if the cover lock unlatched itself during use D. Dirty read heads E. A preventative maintenance by the Engineer

  5. The correct combination of carefully timed disk seeks on the drives in an RA80 disk drive rack could cause: A. A ‘Tune’ to play B. A Small vibration C. A Large vibration D. A very large vibration E. The disk rack to run in ‘horizontal’ mode

  6. A user has been looking through the sad remnants of their life and found a large box of several thousand punchcards of their undergraduate work, which they would like you to do something with. A good Administrator would: A. Call a Computer Museum and get them read B. Write a quick program to interface to a scanner and read them C. Give the user the Punch card hole code info so they could type them in D. Throw them in the bin and tell the user that they’ve been demagnetised E. Throw them at the user from a fourth-floor window

FinanceThe BOFH Content Management System By Simon Travaglia Posted: 05/11/2001 at 07:55 GMT

BOFH 2001: Episode 29

”..And what would you suggest would solve this problem?” the Head of IT asks, over his lunchtime meal.

“Some form of document management system seems appropriate?” The Boss suggests, providing conclusive proof that he’s been talking to vendors without supervision again.

“Oooh, a licence to print money!” The PFY interrupts excitedly.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we’ll obviously be expected to take something unpleasant from the vendor in order to get this… i.e. a heeeuuge bill, content locked into the server or something..”

“No, no, it’s all Open.”

“Open to anyone who’s bought the client to extract the documents from their database perhaps?” I add.

“No, open to everyone!” The Boss responds, obviously having done several weeks homework with the colour brochure. “They say it uses standard windows files. . .”

“Ah - the old ‘Change-the-filename-to-something-obscure-with-a- custom-extension’ trick so you can never find it, except via their interface. Yes, I like it!”

“What do you mean?”

“Well it’s simple. Remember that time stores wanted to move all those archived documents offsite to get some of their space back?”

“Yes?”

“And they got that Document storage company in to pack it all up and store it in ‘standard’ boxfiles?”

“And index EVERYTHING so all someone had to do was ring them and tell them the document name and they’d deliver it?”

“Yes.”

“And we paid them a fat wedge of money to do it, plus recall fees, etc?”

“Uh-Huh.”

“And remember when our company had a huge falling out with their company?”

“When you set fire to their premises, yes.”

“When I tested their environmental monitoring systems to ensure that our documents were safe from fire, yes.”

“Whatever..” The Boss adds doubtfully.

“And remember, we ended up demanding all our documents back?”

“Yes.”

“And they came back, each in its own brown envelope - with a cryptic number on it, taking up over twice the space as originally. Then we had to employ that student to sit in the basement and extract them and file them all again..”

“Last I heard he was still down there,” the head of IT comments.

“So you’re saying that this software is the same as that document storage company, and that they’re trying to disguise it by saying it’s open and offering all-expenses-paid trips to the US for ‘training’???”

JUNKET ALERT!!!

“No, I’m saying we can learn from our mistakes!” I blurt quickly, before The PFY can put his foot in it.

“So there IS something in the Content Management Server?” The Boss gasps.

“There may very well be…” The PFY inserts, catching on at last.

. . . THREE LAGER-FILLED HOLIDAYS IN THE US LATER . . .

“So how’s the Content Management going?” The Boss asks, trying to peek over The PFY’s shoulder at the categorisation process.

“Good, but a few teething problems with which categories to choose from..”

“Really, can I help? I’ve been looking at one of those documents you bought back, and I think I’ve got the hang of it. Financial Documents can be categorised under department, supplier, purchase type, purchaser, purchase category, project, monetary expenditure, assets, physical location, intention, name..”

The Boss burbles on for a while and then wanders off excitedly to put a comprehensive list together for our benefit. The PFY, meantime, continues with his work with the devotion of a professional.

“IT’S AMAZING!!!” The Boss blurts, entering Mission Control with a smug expression on his face. “I’ve been looking at the datastore occupancy figures, and apparently there’s been a huge amount of growth in the holdings just this morning and it’s saying the machine needs some extra hard drives!!! I didn’t realise it would be so popular!!!”

“Oh yes!” I agree. “And it’s proving to be of most benefit to telecommuting workers, who can access their files direct from the Internet. Just look at the Internet usage figures!”

“My goodness! That’s amazing! But how long do you think we’ve got before the disks run out?”

“Two, maybe three days. We’re putting stuff in from older data tapes at the moment, which is why it’s all going online so much faster. What are we up to at the moment?”

“The McHenry.. uh, Service documents.”

“Really? Gosh, it’s amazing what the company’s got that you’ve never heard about! What’s next?”

“Let’s see…. Well, there’s about three or four tapes of the RustyNEddie, um, interactive processing stuff.”

“Rustianeddy. Hmmm, I spose I should give that the old once-over to familiarise myself with it.”

“Well, I’d probably allow myself several hours if I were you.”

“That boring? Well I suppose I’ll just leave it to you. Let me know if there’s any problems tho.”

“Sure thing!”

. . .

Barely a day later, it’s all over. The Boss’s presentation to senior management took a major nosedive when a random choice of “Financial” categorised documents turned up an image from the “Gurlz who do it for Cash” series - as categorised by The PFY. The Boss bought the ‘hackers’ story, but the machine had to go…

… to a storeroom, where the website’s gaining customers like nobodies business.

You’ve got to love newfangled technology…

Are you an expensive Bastard?

  1. The correct way to put a yearly budget plan together is to: A. Add up the cost of all the expected projects and maintenance for the year to come and put that figure forward B. Use last year’s figure and add five per cent C. Use the last year’s figure as well as the previous year to discern a trend, and ask for that D. Look at the performance bonus of the board members for an indication of potential E. Multiply last year’s budget by two after anonymously sending those photos from the Beancounter’s photocopy room after the Christmas Bash

  2. A vendor tells you the product he’s pushing will lower your TCO. This means: A. Your total cost of ownership, taking into account purchase price, maintenance, expected lifetime and possible rental options, will be less B. The TCO will probably not be affected, once you take training, early termination of previous contract and installation fees into account C. He’s on commission and things have been lean this year D. He’s a lying bastard E. C, D and you can probably screw a few lunches out of him before you say no

  3. An annual maintenance contract has come up for renewal and the Vendor takes pains to point out that they have not increased their charges like so many other vendors. This means: A. They’re trying to be competitive B. A, and they’re looking for extra business C. They’ve found a subcontractor who will work for shiny beads and offal D. They’re scared of going into receivership after that anonymous letter to the Tax Dept E. A, C, D, and they re-added those three extra pieces of equipment you cancelled maintenance on earlier in the year (due to an “administrative error”)

-Key There is no key. There is never a key! You don’t need one. Not if you’re the real McCoy! Not if you can clockchip your car computer to get an extra two miles an hour out of the old Rustang before it drops it’s driveshaft after the excess vibration. Not if you remember the heady days of a card punch machine that was so loud it had the pensioners down the road digging trenches and sorting out their meat rations.

NOT if your annual budget is so large your beancounter’s calculator runs out of zeros typing it in…

Anyone else is obviously an imposter.