The
arch-nemesis of the
Admin. Locked in
eternal battle, the
User fights the
Admin by asking
questions covered in the
manual, on the
Web, or otherwise readily
available. The more
inane the question, the
better it serves in the
fight. In addition, the
User finds ever newer, more
complex ways of
breaking or
thinking they
broke the
software.
Examples
include, but are in
no way limited to the following:
- "Where can I find xxxx?"
- "What is the {SMTP,POP,IMAP} server's address?"
- "I just erased my mailbox, and every folder I have created since 1973. Can you undelete those?"
- "Pine just gave me the error xxxx. What does it mean?"
- "Um, yeah. I think the Internet is down. I just got a 'Can't contact server' error.'"
- "Can I have more disk space for my por.. uh, data, please?"
- "I just got this error message from ${rival_ISP}. Can you tell me what it means?"
As a
first line of
defense, the
Admins created
Tech Support. But many
Users have found
two ways of getting
past this. They write
root instead of
Tech Support or
call the
admin. Second, they
concentrate on
breaking more software. (
Microsoft is a big
aid to the
user, and their
software has therefore been
widely propagated) Because of this, the
Admins created
The Clue Stick, a
spiritual 4x4 for User
Education (
AKA LART).
Although it may
seem comical,
make no
mistake. This is an
epic battle, on the lines of
good versus evil. The
Admin fights for
disk space,
memory, and, of course, enough
CPU to
quickly crack DES. The user, on the other hand, battles for the
Admin's
sanity.
For more
information, see
BOFH, and many
Usenet newsgroups.