---
title: Love in the Time of Root Access
date: 2025-10-11T17:06:00Z
modified: 2025-10-11T17:06:00Z
permalink: "https://xodice.org/2025/10/11/love-in-the-time-of-root-access/"
type: post
status: publish
excerpt: "I grew up reading BOFH stories like they were sacred scripture, tales of sysadmin vengeance and terminal justice that shaped my sense of humor, my ethics, and maybe my lack of both. Somewhere between the first sudo and the last rage ticket, I became the thing I once admired: the Bastard Operator From Hell. These days my love language is uptime, my poetry is a clean log, and my mischief lives in cron jobs. It is not cruelty, it is control. And honestly, it is beautiful."
wpid: 82
categories:
  - Nostalgia
  - SysOps
author: Xodice
---

I still remember the first time I read a BOFH story. I was too young to have root, but old enough to understand that “user error” was a euphemism for “the meatware failed again.” Those tales of creative sysadmin vengeance felt like poetry, kernel-level justice served with a smirk and a finger hovering over the `rm -rf /home/$USER` key combo.

Fast-forward a couple decades, and here I am, the very monster I once admired. My racks hum softly like a love song, fans spinning in perfect sync, LEDs blinking in Morse code that probably translates to _“you need more coffee.”_ I’ve become the thing I adored: the Bastard Operator From Hell.

It started innocently. A few pranks on interns: aliasing `ls` to `sl`, swapping `bash` for `fish`, maybe a sneaky cron job that echoed “All work and no play makes Jack a dull sysadmin” into `/dev/pts/2` every 15 minutes. But it grew. Soon I was orchestrating subtle chaos across departments, DHCP leases that mysteriously expired during meetings, print queues that only processed jobs containing the word “please,” and an “AI-driven” helpdesk bot that auto-replied to tickets with _“Have you tried thinking harder?”_

They called me “paranoid.” I called it _preventive security._
They said I was “abusive.” I called it _user education._
They asked why I smirk every time I type `sudo`. I told them: _because it’s the closest thing to godhood._

But beneath the snark and shell scripts, there’s a strange tenderness. Because I’ve learned that the BOFH archetype isn’t about cruelty, it’s about control in a world that doesn’t understand the beauty of uptime. It’s about loving your systems more than your sanity. It’s about caring enough to keep the network alive, even if you have to break a few users to do it.

And maybe that’s what love really looks like in our world: running `fsck` on yourself at 3 AM, whispering sweet nothings to your RAID array, and knowing that the true romance isn’t with another human, it’s with a perfectly balanced configuration file that finally passes syntax check on the first try.

So here’s to Simon Travaglia, patron saint of sysadmin cynicism.
You taught us that love doesn’t always wear a halo, sometimes it wears a black hoodie, lives in `/etc`, and has `chmod 700`on its heart.

## Topics

**Categories:** [Nostalgia](https://xodice.org/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/taxonomy/category/nostalgia.md), [SysOps](https://xodice.org/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/taxonomy/category/sysops.md)