From: cdale@silly.techmonkeys.net
Date: Mon Jan 15 2001 - 21:58:21 PST
LOL! I have no idea, but geeks are just so funny. Especially tech
support geeks. That reminded me of this steve page that I ran across a
long time ago... Can't seem to find it now, but it was sort of like this:
http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/u/samills/cult.html
but more geeky, and non-Steves couldn't join.
C
On Sun, 14 Jan 2001, Tony Finch wrote:
> cdale@silly.techmonkeys.net wrote:
> >At Red Hat, we had the "Body Opponent Bag," or Bob, in support.
>
> Was that named after the Demon Bob or was it an independent coinage?
>
> On the topic of the Demon Bob the Jargon File is correct (although the
> ordering is wrong -- "Bob" was a generic tech support name before the
> influx in 1995), which is nice because it still has the incorrect
> pronunciation of "meta" in the "Commonwealth Hackish" section despite
> my attempts to explain to ESR that it is just wrong and an invalid
> generalization from the different pronunciation of greek letters. So
> is the term "Commonwealth" because they don't speak like that in
> Massachussets (etc.).
>
> bob n. At Demon Internet, all tech support personal are called "Bob".
> (Female support personnel have an option on "Bobette"). [...] it was
> triggered by an unusually large draft of new tech-support people in
> 1995. It was observed that there would be much duplication of names.
> To ease the confusion, it was decided that all support techs would
> henceforth be known as "Bob", and identity badges were created
> labelled "Bob 1" and "Bob 2". (No, we never got any further).
>
> The reason for "Bob" rather than anything else is due to a luser
> calling and asking to speak to "Bob", despite the fact that no "Bob"
> was currently working for Tech Support. Since we all know "the
> customer is always right", it was decided that there had to be at
> least one "Bob" on duty at all times, just in case.
>
> This sillyness inexorably snowballed. Shift leaders and managers began
> to refer to their groups of "bobs". Whole ranks of support machines
> were set up (and still exist in the DNS as of 1999) as bob1 through
> bobN. Then came alt.tech-support.recovery, and it was filled with
> Demon support personnel. They all referred to themselves, and to
> others, as `bob', and after a while it caught on. There is now a Bob
> Code describing the Bob nature.
>
> Commonwealth Hackish n. Hacker jargon as spoken in English outside the
> U.S., esp. in the British Commonwealth. It s reported that
> Commonwealth speakers are more likely to pronounce truncations like
> `char' and `soc', etc., as spelled [...]. The prefix meta may be
> pronounced /mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is usually /bee't*/,
> zeta is usually /zee't*/, and so forth. [...]
>
> Tony.
>
-- "Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases, think for yourself." --Doris Lessing, British writer
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