The guy who wrote BOFH is a nerd-humor demi-god IMO. First time I read the first one, I was literally rolling on the ground laughing so hard I cried. My face hurt for days. Thinking about the panic of users when they realize how screwed they are makes me giggle even today.
The excuse of the day is "extra-solar photonic rays".
Hehe.
I worked as a UNIX Admin at a university supporting grad students years ago. Back then, there was no firewall segmenting the internal and external networks, so all servers and workstations had real internet IPs.
As it turned out, I named one of the new boxes bofh. That fact somehow got around to Simon and he emailed me thanks. We chatted back and forth a bit. You might not expect it from reading his work, but he really is a nice guy.
(Okay, maybe he's only nice to other admins.)
You know, now that I think about it, when I built that server was right about the time the grads started trembling and slowly backing out of my office instead of being casual...