101 Things You Do Not Want Your System Administrator to Say

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

 

See also: Doctor Bob had sex with one of his patients… (Patient Sex)

+ There are 7 comments on this page.- There are 7 comments on this page.

tim - Thursday 19 February 2004, 10:31 PM
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
moo - Wednesday 28 July 2004, 11:30 AM
lol :-)
Daemo - Thursday 29 July 2004, 2:44 AM
haha, ripper. except number 45 and 48 are the same (Sorry, we deleted that package last week...)
Aimaz - Friday 30 July 2004, 8:57 AM
87. You might want to escape the ';' at the end of the line. find /usr2 -name nethack -exec rm -f {}\; Otherwise it'll never work
Ned - Friday 30 July 2004, 3:26 PM
It’s probably best that it never work – but I have changed it anyway
GingerTea - Tuesday 10 August 2004, 4:46 PM
This is great...I'll have to remember some of these lines for sure!
Ed - Wednesday 3 August 2005, 7:57 PM
On 97, 'an' should be 'a'. Ending punctuation seems to vary a lot. Thank you for a great page, I will be remembering it.
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