1. Listen to your computer-loving, techie-type friends when they give you advice about things you should do with your computer. If you ignore them, and you get into problems, this is the person you should blame:
Yourself <—
2. It is not nice to hack into a website just because its owners have been lazy, cheap or dumb enough to let it become an easy target, find a list of email addresses and publish them on the internet. It’s hard enough for someone like me to memorize “strong” passwords without having to change them all the time. A pox on you, you … you … fucking lowlife cocksuckers!*
3. If you have an opportunity to use a co-worker’s computer in the office, it is not good manners to visit pornography sites, especially if you neglect to delete the “history” and all the tracking cookies. It is especially bad manners to leave a particularly raunchy picture up on the screen for your co-worker to find when he or she gets back to the desk, especially if the co-worker has no idea of the quickest way to get the image off the screen.
4. If you have a newer, better computer than someone else, please be kind enough not to brag about it incessantly. If you do, you alone will be responsible for whatever physical violence ensues.
5. Please don’t send those mass-forwarded emails, especially the chain mail variety, to everyone in your address book. If you do forward those to someone, please delete all those lists of email addresses before hitting “send.” If you do not do this, and some enterprising person gets hold of all those nice, active addresses, there will be a great explosion of spam in the land and everybody will blame you.
6. Anyone who automatically hits “reply to all” on every message should have all email privileges revoked until he or she gets over the habit.
*Miss Computer Manners apologizes to her more sensitive readers for her momentary lapse in language. There just wasn’t any better way to say it.
No 3. is so right. In a previous job, the MD of the company would make sure we all signed up to an internet usage policy nearly every week, stating that we wouldn’t log on to offensive websites or send emails with anything that might contain pics of Bon Jovi. One day we got a note to say that the MD had resigned. Later it came out that he had accessed porn on the work pc, didn’t delete history or files and to add to ass to the ridiculousness of it, it was a tech company!
Sometimes I am convinced that computers deliberately turn normally intelligent people stupid.
Are you blaming your friendly 10 year old Bastard Operator From Hel — oops webmistress — for suggesting that you use long passwords with ‘caps and small letters, numerals, and symbols, such as @#$%?
She, who understands that such passwørds can make you feel like @#$%.
No, I am blaming the FLCs (fucking lowlife cocksuckers) for the necessity of using complicated passwords that tax the brain, especially when you leave them at home, which I did yet again today.
My friendly BOFH has been covered in No. 1 above, along with the appropriate obeissance. If we would all listen to you, a lot of pain, agony and misery would be avoided.
BOFH dit de sa voix la meilleure Charles Montgomery Burns, «Excellent»…
Merci beaucoup (I think).
AMEN!!! Maybe we should have computer licenses like driver licenses, to show that the operator has demonstrated basic understanding of the computer operation and protocols, before granting access to same.
Hehe! And you’d have to be at least 16 years old before you could get a license to surf the internet!