relatable by all the unseen engineers whose job it is to keep the machines running, so that everybody else can do their jobs.

especially so in the early days of computing, from whence the stories come; where "reliability" was a laugh

They still lord over us, but ask ChatGPT to write Terraform for them.

Most users only bother with quick solutions for whatever problem they have, not with any deeper understanding. They get the kind of expertise where the BOFH only has to sit on the sidelines with a bucket of popcorn, watch the user shred their own system and offer a pristine replacement with all their local data gone.

The amount of times I have seen users click past pages of apt install ouput after messing with the package sources has been well above zero.

1) WTF, Jackie Chan was on SNL?!? Ya live and learn...

2) And they had -- remarkably current, today of all days -- pagers.