[Editor's Note: By the way, I've actually heard some of these things from my sysadmin. But then, I used to work at AT&T.]

Things you do NOT want your System Administrator to say:

  1. You did WHAT to the floppy???
  2. Sorry, we deleted that package last week.
  3. NO!!! Not THAT button!!!
  4. [looks at workstation] "Say, what version of DOS is this thing running?"
  5. YEEEHAA!!! What a CRASH!!!
  6. What do you mean that could take down the whole network?
  7. What's this switch for, anyway?
  8. Tell me again what that '-r' option to rm does...
  9. Say, what does "Superblock Error" mean, anyhow?
  10. If I know it wasn't going to work, I would have tested it sooner.
  11. Was that YOUR directory?
  12. System coming down in 0 minutes...
  13. The backup procedure works fine, but the restore is tricky!
  14. Hey Fred, did you save that posting about restoring filesystems with vi and a toothpick? More importantly, did you print it out?
  15. The sprinkler system isn't supposed to leak, is it?
  16. It is only a minor upgrade, the system should be back up in a few hours. (This said on a Monday afternoon.)
  17. I think we can plug just one more thing into this outlet strip without tripping the breaker.
  18. What is all this I hear about static charges destroying computers?
  19. I found this rabbit program that is supposed to test system performance and I have it running now.
  20. Ummm....Didn't you say you turned it off?
  21. The network's down, but we're working on it. Come back after dinner. (Usually said at 2200 the night before thesis deadline.)
  22. Oops! Save your work, everyone! FAST!!!
  23. Boy, it's a lot easier when you know what you're doing.
  24. I hate it when that happens.
  25. Why did it say '/bin/rm: not found'?
  26. You can do this patch with the system up...
  27. What happens to a hard disk when you drop it?
  28. Well, I've got a backup, but the only copy of the restore program was on THAT disk...
  29. Hey, what does mkfs do?
  30. Where did you say those backup tapes were kept?
  31. ...and if we just swap these two disk controllers like this...
  32. Don't do that, it'll crash the sys...DAMN!
  33. What's this hash prompt on my terminal mean?
  34. Now it's funny you should ask that, because I don't know either...
  35. Can you get VMS for this Sparc thingy?
  36. I don't care what he says, I'm NOT having it on MY network.
  37. We don't support that. We WON'T support that.
  38. ...and after I patched the microcode...
  39. You've got TECO. What more do you want?
  40. We prefer not to change the root password, it's a nice easy one...
  41. Just add yourself to the password file and make a directory...
  42. Uh-oh.....
  43. Shit!!
  44. What the hell!?
  45. Go get your backup tape. (You do have a backup tape?)
  46. That's SOOOOO bizarre.
  47. Wow!! Look at this...
  48. Hey!! The Suns don't do this.
  49. Terminated??!
  50. What software license?
  51. Well, it's doing something...
  52. Wow...that seemed fast...
  53. I got a better job at Lockheed.
  54. Management says...
  55. Sorry, the new equipment didn't get budgeted.
  56. What do you mean that wasn't a copy?
  57. It didn't do that a minute ago...
  58. Where's the GUI on this thing?
  59. Damn, and I just bought that soda...
  60. Where's the DIR command?
  61. The drive ate the tape but that's OK, I brought my screwdriver.
  62. I cleaned up the root partition and now there's lots of free space.
  63. What's this "any" key I'm supposed to press?
  64. Do you smell something?
  65. What's that grinding sound?
  66. I have never seen it do *that* before...
  67. I think it should not be doing that...
  68. I remember the last time I saw it do that...
  69. You might as well all go home early today ...
  70. My leave starts tomorrow.
  71. Ooops. (said in a quiet, almost surprised voice)
  72. Hmm, maybe if I do this...
  73. "Why is my "rm *.o" taking so long?"
  74. Hmmm, curious...
  75. Well, my files were backed up.
  76. What do you mean you needed that directory?
  77. What do you mean /home was on that disk? I umounted it!
  78. Do you really need your home directory to do any work?
  79. Oracle will be down until 8pm, but you can come back in and finish your work when it comes up tonight.
  80. I didn't think anybody would be doing any work at 2am, so I killed your job.
  81. Yes, I chowned all the files to belong to pvcs. Is that a problem to you?
  82. We're standardizing on AIX.
  83. Wonder what this command does?
  84. What did you say your (l)user name was...? ;-)
  85. Uh huh......"nu -k $USER".. no problem....sure thing...
  86. OH, SH*T! (as they scrabble at the keyboard for ^c).
  87. And what does it mean 'rm: .o: No such file or directory'?
  88. Nobody was using that file /vmunix, were they?
  89. The only copy of Norton Utilities was on THAT disk???
  90. What do you mean by "fired"?
  91. OK, let's set cron to clear out the users' home directories every night...
  92. dd if=/dev/null of=/vmunix
  93. find /usr2 -name nethack -exec rm -f {};
  94. Any more trouble from you and your account gets moved to the 750.
  95. Ooohh, lovely, it runs SVR4
  96. SMIT makes it all so much easier...
  97. Next week we're ditching these UNIX machines and moving to Windows NT. Now won't that be exciting?
  98. I don't care if your machine's crashed! I just lost another life!
  99. When I were a lad I'd have given an arm and a leg for that much filestore.

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