Uptime is immensely important to all of the nerds I know. Many outsiders do not understand this importance.
Obviously, an amusing anecdote is in order.
So I'm sitting there at this
LinuxPPC machine (a Power Mac 7200) and this kid is nagging me about going to grab some food. As many non-nerds do not understand, when in a computer induced trance, outside stimuli, especially hunger, are irrelevant.
Dogbert managed to get a large set of china plates on
Dilbert's head due to this phenomenon.
Getting increasingly agitated, this kid is typing random keys while I'm trying to do something, and finally he hits control-option-power, which for those of you
Windows people is the equivalent of control-alt-delete (you can't trap it by the way). The loud mac chime comes up, and my friend who the LinuxPPC machine belongs to walks by, and sees what has happened. This kid is feeling pretty good about himself, laughing at me because he's rebooted the machine and subsequently interrupted what I had been working on.
My friend picks this kid up, and throws him, not only to the ground, but over a chair in the process. Now my friend probably would have sat there through a torrent of
Yo Mama jokes, probably endured a number of insults, but this was his uptime (about a month I think at the time). The kid was so bewildered that he's convinced to this day that my friend is a
sociopath. The lesson?
Don't mess with a nerd's uptime. True story.