TITLE The Bastich By Hart
PANEL 1 (BASTICH sits at the Helpdesk workstation while speaking on the phone.) BASTICH: ...I know it's hard to believe, sir, but the only reason this could be happening is that you forgot your password.
PANEL 2 (Reverse view of BASTICH's workstation revealing that he is playing Doom while speaking on the phone.) BASTICH: Okay, the computer did it. Look, if you just give me your social security number and a new password, I'll fix the problem, okay? Thanks. Bye.
PANEL 3 (After hanging up, BASTICH leans back in his chair.) BASTICH: Geez... thats the eighth user today to forget their password. Some people on the campus have a memory span that could be lapped by that of a GOLDFISH. ELECTRONIC VOICE: You said it!
PANEL 4 (BASTICH looks at his workstation, which appears to be the source of the voice.) BASTICH: Who said that?! WORKSTATION: I did, dummy! BASTICH: My workstation? WORKSTATION: Yup... Of course, sometimes I switch the passwords around just to kick up the dust a little...
PANEL 5 (Close up on the Workstation speaking.) BASTICH: Wha-- Why would you do something like that? WORKSTATION: Boredom. You don't think this 64-bit RISC processor was made to run 200 instances of PINE do you?
PANEL 6 (Elsewhere, in a dark room, the SENIOR ADMIN smiles as he speaks into a microphone while another ADMIN chuckles in the background.) BASTICH: Well, no. SENIOR ADMIN: Of course not. Oh, by the way would you knock it off with the X-Rated Web sites? You're going to corrode My Memory cache with that trash!
CREDITS Bastich (c) 1997 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
The Helpdesk saga continues! This time, Bastich's boss has a little fun at his expense.
Forgotten passwords were by far the most common problem to cross the Helpdesk. Luckily, it was super easy to reset the password and get the user back on their feet. Some users wouldn't admit they forgot, and would cast blame on "The system" before accepting their fate and typing in their new password.
It's a quaint sign of the times that Bastich asks for the user's Social Security Number before changing the password. The SSN was a handy unique identifier and was used absolutely everywhere. Some professors even posted grades outside their office, listed by with SSN instead of name (ironically, to protect the student's privacy).
In the second panel, Bastich is playing Doom on the X11 workstation. I wasn't much of an FPS player, but game selection was slim on Unix systems back then.
Pine (short for Pine Is Not Elm) was the text-only e-mail app of choice for most of our users. Elm was the older e-mail app that Pine was not. MIME attachments weren't really a thing yet, so reading your e-mail on a dumb terminal was no problem at all.