I still remember the first time I read a BOFH story. I was too young to have root, but old enough to understand that “user error” was a euphemism for “the meatware failed again.” Those tales of creative sysadmin vengeance felt like poetry, kernel-level justice served with a smirk and a finger hovering over the rm -rf /home/$USER key combo.
Fast-forward a couple decades, and here I am, the very monster I once admired. My racks hum softly like a love song, fans spinning in perfect sync, LEDs blinking in Morse code that probably translates to “you need more coffee.” I’ve become the thing I adored: the Bastard Operator From Hell.
It started innocently. A few pranks on interns: aliasing ls to sl, swapping bash for fish, maybe a sneaky cron job that echoed “All work and no play makes Jack a dull sysadmin” into /dev/pts/2 every 15 minutes. But it grew. Soon I was orchestrating subtle chaos across departments, DHCP leases that mysteriously expired during meetings, print queues that only processed jobs containing the word “please,” and an “AI-driven” helpdesk bot that auto-replied to tickets with “Have you tried thinking harder?”
They called me “paranoid.” I called it preventive security.
They said I was “abusive.” I called it user education.
They asked why I smirk every time I type sudo. I told them: because it’s the closest thing to godhood.
But beneath the snark and shell scripts, there’s a strange tenderness. Because I’ve learned that the BOFH archetype isn’t about cruelty, it’s about control in a world that doesn’t understand the beauty of uptime. It’s about loving your systems more than your sanity. It’s about caring enough to keep the network alive, even if you have to break a few users to do it.
And maybe that’s what love really looks like in our world: running fsck on yourself at 3 AM, whispering sweet nothings to your RAID array, and knowing that the true romance isn’t with another human, it’s with a perfectly balanced configuration file that finally passes syntax check on the first try.
So here’s to Simon Travaglia, patron saint of sysadmin cynicism.
You taught us that love doesn’t always wear a halo, sometimes it wears a black hoodie, lives in /etc, and has chmod 700on its heart.