Fun with the log book.

As you may already know, I spend quite a bit of time in the machine room (or the computer center, however you wish to call it). The policy is that whenever you enter the machine room, you have to sign a log book with your name, date, time, and a description of the reason for your visit. At the end of the day, some unfortunate soul has to transcribe all those hand-written entries, and that list gets emailed to everyone in CUIT. I was always under the impression that nobody (besides my friend Sonu) ever reads that list.

So lately, whenever I go to the machine room, I always sign the log book with a slightly odd message, just to see if anyone will notice (and also, just to amuse myself).

At first, I tried leaving complete gibberish mixed with usual IT lingo, like "server blah boody bah bah reboot tape eep op ork ah ah scsi" but eventually that got boring. I also gave it a go with the macabre, like "The server is dead. It slashed its wrists, I mean, network cables, last night. I am here to bury it." But that sort of stuff doesn't come naturally to me (I am a very birds are singing, flowers are blooming sort of girl), and I can't exactly take a lot of time with the log book without arousing some suspicions.

So now I started leaving short little poems. The key is to stay within the length of a typical log book entry, which is about two lines. (If you write a six stanza ballad, obviously somebody will notice). Here are a few examples of my recent entries...

I couldn't find the recovery disk.
Too bad Windows doesn't have fsck.

All the robot drives are down,
That's the reason for my sad frown.

I'm installing some RAM and a new SCSI card,
So now the CPU won't need to work so hard.

Everything is so slow,
due to a buffer overflow.

And so on...

So far, I haven't gotten any "wtf are you smoking" emails from management, so I have to believe that nobody ever reads any of these log entries. I'll give it another few weeks.