Crashed Pips - Computers, politics, emetic trash

The Euro 2008 football competition is currently taking up the majority of BBC1’s and ITV1’s television schedules, prompting some soap opera viewers to complain that their favourite soap operas have been moved to compensate. Typically, the Coronation Street cronies and the EastEnders posse can’t (seemingly) go for more than twenty-four hours without seeing someone shouting at somebody else “YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER!” or “It’s all sawted… innit.”

Watching these letters of complaint being read out on Points of View last week, I wondered what it would be like to have an IT soap opera, for the Slashdot-reading masses of nerds who surf the internet with an army of Sun 3/50s and funny cat pictures (think along the lines of Dr. Blockbuster, whom we first met a few weeks back)?

So, in typical fashion, it is with considerable pleasure that I reveal the world’s first (well, to my knowledge) soap opera aimed at nerds: The Sysadmin. OK, it’s technically a serialised novel with no definite end, but it borrows several concepts from soap operas, including:

• an overworked, underpaid, handsome protagonist who even hetrosexual men can’t deny secretly fancying
• a silly, cockish, David Brent-esque baddie
• the evil outsider (this week, a Borgsoft salesman)
• reality inflated into surrealism (although more into comedy than melodrama)
• the ludicrously implausible assaults and deaths, along the lines of people being buried under a concrete slab or murdered by being thrown into a deep freezer
• et cetera

However, it also adds a ‘nerdy’ spin onto the format, with several characteristics including:

• the protagonist is a network administrator (not of the evil sort, but of the benevolent sort who works too much and has a manager who’s a bit of a bastard)
• it obeys the laws of physics (well, mostly)
• the part numbers are in hexadecimal
• the whole thing is written in vi

So, without further ado, let’s launch into this week’s edition The Salesman Calls, in which we meet our hero, Jason Richter, his arch-nemesis from Microsoft, Steve Grobmanoff, and Jason’s boss, Mr. Upson of F&U Corporation, who has the intellectual capability of a bag of peanuts. Gasp as the Beastmaster’s minion demands several thousand pounds to stop the network succumbing to Internet threats! Sit in shock as our hero convinces his clueless CEO that he can better the Borg’s offering for a fraction of the cost! Turn red with rage when M$ calls him in the middle of the night to demand money!

OK, enough hype. Here it is. And yes, it was written entirely in vi. It’s best viewed in an external editor, such as TextEdit, vim, gedit, kate, Notepad, etc. Oh, and because I’m feeling kind, it’s cc-by-nc 3.0 licensed.

Eat your heart out, Adam Woodyatt.