(only partly kidding about that.)

Man driving car with dent: Bad driver. Wearing basbeall cap: Worse driver. Driving with window open, elbow on frame, hand on top sill, close haircut, and baseball cap -- Cop.

Hard Drive light turns off 30 seconds after you stop moving the mouse -- not enough RAM.

Story starts with "A friend of mine had a friend who.." --lie.

Story starts with "No shit, there I was..." -- lie, told in a military context.

Excuse starts with "It was the phase of the moon" -- BOFH lie. Hint -- don't call him on it.

Fuse blows, you replace it, it blows again -- It's Broken. Honest. Really. Wrapping the fuse in foil is a *BAD* idea. Honest. Trust Me.

Batter hits a foul ball straight back -- he's doped out the pitcher's velocity, and will almost certainly get on base in the next pitch.

Poster is from joe@home.com -- troll.

Erik starts being very polite -- run.

That may be a sexist lie. But I honestly don't know any female BOFHs. I'd like to. Hmm. Maybe Elizabeth Zwicky's one, but she seems to helpful to be a true BOFH.

This is very anti-BOFH. She's talented as all hell, and hey, anybody with a ligature in thier name is automatically cool. But I don't think she's a BOFH. Elizabeth Zwicky, however, helped href="http://www.tcsa.org/lisa2001/laws.txt"> write the laws of System Administration.

She's worked with a few BOfHs, though. Ask me how I know. :-)

On another note, Elizabeth and Steve were working on a book expanding on the collected wisdom Erik linked to. Haven't heard anything about it recently, but one can only hope it appears soon.

-j

Where'd Teresa say that?

And in the usual way of things that reminds me of "fascinating", which when used in a short, judgemental message, by someone who's just shown up, is not an infallible sign that the person is going to be a jerk, but is certainly an indication.

Okay, now hit the start button on your stopwatch.

Okay--I've said it, so no one else has to.
--Elric

Don't need to -- the email address shows remarkably bofhly traits.

Where do I know your name from? Think, think -- wait -- same J Greely who fights the good fight for Minolta gear on photo.net?

Of course, not all of us from the South open conversations with "you folks," but the point I'm trying to make is that I know plenty of intelligent, conscientous people who may occasionally pepper their speech (and, regretably, their comment posting) with "you folks".

John ;)

This is why those of the Southern persuasion should be encouraged to use "all y'all," which is actually a very useful turn of phrase in a second-person plural situation. (Also useful, if you lean more toward Appalachia than Dixie is "all yins," but that may be a different argument.) YM, of course, MV.

Another tell that you're dealing with a troll--overuse of the word "Clearly," which is then followed by a stream of highly subjective twaddle.

Wandering into an existing conversation and addressing all present with "you folks" is a bit different: it doesn't say "you, all of whom are my friends", but "you, who are allied in something-or-other I'm not part of."

I am not wearing any pants.

3:26

Btw, I've been late to choir sometimes, and said "Sorry, I was up late...it was Full Moon." Now I could have started that with "It was the phase of the moon when we usually have circle..." Am I a BOFH, whatever that is?

I know I'm missing something here...begging for clarification.

It's a computing term.

see The Register for recent, inferior examples of the genre, and here for the definitive examples of the genre.

Especially "what you (folks/people) fail to understand is..."

Let's look at what TNH said...

I don92t know why this class of yoyos feels compelled to say 93you folks94, but I92ve been quietly tabulating instances of it here and on Electrolite, and it92s a clear marker for 93I am an idiot94.

Note that she doesn't claim that people saying "you folks" in the world at large are automatically idiots. She's saying that people who say "you folks" in the message boards here and on Electolite are most likely trolling or freepers, and is basing this on emperical evidence. (I must warn that correllation != caustation, here, but most here know this.)

It's a standard trope, too -- close related to "you people," as in "if you people love Saddam so much...."

Now, the bit about the short hair, arm in window, and baseball cap = cop? That's gospel.

This started when my "repeating trope" switch got flipped by seeing two "you folks" comments in one 24-hour period, one in Electrolite and one in Making Light, from two demonstrably different jerks. After that I was watching for further instances.

There've been more than enough to confirm my suspicions. I'd been thinking of posting that observation for the last month or so, but hadn't gotten around to it until Skmr reminded me.

The rules about "not previously seen here" and "pretends to be administering correction to the entire conversation" will eliminate just about all innocent uses of "just folks", though anyone who can't distinguish those on their own is ... um ... not my species, so I don't know what more I can add. But "you people" is clearly a variant. Or maybe "you folks" is the variant.

Hard to say. Easy to spot.

And on the BOfH-scale, I was actually thinking of our (EDZ's and mine, that is) mutual former co-worker who blew off the server backups for six months, ordering a junior contractor to stall restore requests while he worked on something else.

I, of course, have abandoned my BOfHly past and made the leap to Bearded Wizard Who Telecommutes.

...who is suddenly glad that more than a decade of arguing on Usenet has apparently burned out my "you folks" gland, although I do still have a strong case of the Actuallys. But only after I've spent half an hour with Google confirming that I'm right. :-)

-j

I noticed the general degredation of the site (I've currently lost my photo-muse, I'm trying to get it back. Unemployment and housework aren't helping.)

And on the BOfH-scale, I was actually thinking of our (EDZ's and mine, that is) mutual former co-worker who blew off the server backups for six months, ordering a junior contractor to stall restore requests while he worked on something else.

Sheesh and Fruufr. I acquired a rep when I walked over to a user's desk, and handed them a CD with thier mail archive on it. I'd noticed thier backup had run much quicker the night before (Well, first, I noticed the whole job had run too fast, a sign of problems.) Looking, I noticed thier archive files totalled about 3K. A quick check in the past showed they were in the hundreds of megabytes.

So, I pull them off tape, burn them to a CD, walk up. The user's trying to call me. "I can't find my email!" "Here," hand them CD, walk away.

Yeah, I could have just restored in place, and they'd probably never known. That's why I burned the CD.

I, of course, have abandoned my BOfHly past and made the leap to Bearded Wizard Who Telecommutes.

Heh. Good gig. I don't mind the late hours in the office, so long as I get some comptime back to make conventions. All I know is I want a job that will send me to LISA again -- I rolled the dice with a startup, and well, we lost.

Methinks there's a biased sample here or something. Because that could describe my father (well, when he had hair) and all my uncles none of whom are in law enforcement.

MKK

I'm afraid I sometimes fall into thinking that way, but I do my damndest to wrestle it to the ground before I post a comment (with a degree of success which I imagine I'm not the best judge of).

And, J Greely, I have made it from Beareded Wizard Who Telecommutes to Bearded Wizard Who Does Not Drive Far -- less stress and a cleaner office at home. (Ask my about my 30+ year old Minoltas that still work well, when I can find the batteries . . .)

As it happens, I have one going spare, but it needs a new chassis...

Interested, Alison? :)

The emperor's naked,

and I'm not afraid to point it out.

I know what you're going to say.

You're just saying that because

you would say that,

of course.

What a . . . coincidence.

Think about it.

And I'm convinced that my employers move my office every few years just to get me to clean it.

-j

By the way, sorry for the misspell on your name Teresa, I would claim grief and tears blurred my, uh, hands... but really I am just spelling challenged.

Well, it's the old problem. Nobody notices a competent sysadmin. They sure as heck notice incompetent ones. But how do you make it clear that there is a reason for them to be paying you money?

Fixing the problem mere seconds after they realize there is a problem is your best bet. Before isn't good -- well, it is, but it hardly gets you noticed as a good sysadmin. Way after is bad -- they remember the downtime.

As to your batteries -- they're probably mercury cells, which put out a higher voltage. Replaceing them is problematic, there are lots of servicable old camereas whose meters depend on mercury cells. Best place to find them is electronics surplus stores.

(Oh, yeah. I've the mandatory Unix beard and glasses, though mine's pretty close cropped. This is also known in other realms as "The Sensitive Fannish Face.")

I've seen this syndrome in perfectly reasonable people. And even fans. :)

UK examples, where they seem to be much more sensible about cars, as a general rule, wouldn't apply here. I can't speak for what marks a bad driver in the UK.

At least at one time was true that the difference in experience made National Health the place to get your right elbow fixed, Group Health the place to get your left elbow fixed if you had a choice

You would say that, [poster's name]. You and Hitler! Fuck you, Godwin, I'll say what I want! Hitler Hitler Hitler! You Nazis!

I don't know about you, but I laughed out loud.

(Although the generic 3-month-old White Ford Transit van, ideally with hire company decals, runs a very close second. People look at you as if you're part of the cast of Death Race 2000.)

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/75594p-69826c.html

Peace,
Madeleine

As in:

Hey, you f*cks, have you ever thought about how some relgious groups type G_d instead of God? Then, this as a given, now as a matter of course, much as the strident flows of sensibility and finely sifted logic cascade down into the crater of mankind's willful and woe-begotten ignorance, the question naturally arises: what is the relationship between f*ck and G_d? Surely this is no mere academic curiousity, no slight and haphazard coincidence of the infinite fates, but, verily!, one of the lost keys to the temple of Solomon itself! Think about it, folks.

With reference to the use of 'clearly' back at the start of this thread, I once had an Economics lecturer in Dublin who said that when a politician said 'clearly,' what he really meant was 'if you don't understand or agree with what I'm saying, you're thick.'

I think that is all to often the case online too.

I just stopped practicing in February, and I think I've just about got the "clearly" thing licked, though I'm still working on shedding "with regard to."

Sentences that begin with "I feel that" or "I think that" indicate a passive aggressive academic (most often a psychologist).

:)

If you let things get out of hand, next thing you know you'll have several obnoxious drunks who'll all be taking courage from each other, and meanwhile the rest of the people at the party will be disheartened. That's when a thoughtful hostess needs to bring out her darling lace-trimmed baseball bat and dispense a little cranial trauma where it'll do the most good.

Or at least my wife tells me I have . . .

(Pity that these days, one longs for a newbie clever enough to use the word "cabal.")

"The beautiful thing about living in a ____________ society/country is ..."

"No offence meant"

"it's just my opinion" (Gee, and here I thought you were channelling Spirits From The Beyond)

"Obviously..."

"How can you say/ask that?"

References to the reader having no sense of humour or to PCness are, of course, pretty much gimmes. However did people who can't tell a joke and make it funny to save their lives survive and maintain any sort of self-esteem before we started applying this net-wide equivalent of "peer promotion" to them? When *I* was a wee lass, you laid an egg, you had to stand there and turn beet coloured while everyone around you went ah heh heh heh heh and tried to think of a tactful way to change the subject. Humour was better then... you learned from your mistakes.

Me, I need some sort of twelve-step program to get rid of "basically". (Or even "well, basically", as in "The British Well-Basically Club".)

The word I'd hate to have to do without is "actually", though I'm prone to overuse it. In a world full of spin, disinformation, and misused language, "actually" is needed too often.

An intermediate solution might be having a breathalyzer in the room; you can drink until the beeper goes off or whatever. I've always believed that obnoxious drunks are drunker than non-obnoxious ones. How's that go? "Jocose, bellicose, lachrymose, comatose"?

-j

Actually.

MKK

Did it again.

I suspect your supervisor wanted to reserve the actuallys for herself. :-)

-j