At Demon Internet, all tech support personal are
called "Bob". (Female support personnel have an option on
"Bobette"). This has nothing to do with Bob the divine
drilling-equipment salesman of the Church of the SubGenius.
Nor is it acronymized from "Brother Of BOFH", though all
parties agree it could have been. Rather, it was triggered by an
unusually large draft of new tech-support people in 1995. It was
observed that there would be much duplication of names. To ease
the confusion, it was decided that all support techs would
henceforth be known as "Bob", and identity badges were created
labelled "Bob 1" and "Bob 2". (No, we never got any further).
The reason for "Bob" rather than anything else is due to a
luser calling and asking to speak to "Bob", despite the fact
that no "Bob" was currently working for Tech Support. Since we
all know "the customer is always right", it was decided that
there had to be at least one "Bob" on duty at all times, just in
case.
This sillyness inexorably snowballed. Shift leaders and managers
began to refer to their groups of "bobs". Whole ranks of support
machines were set up (and still exist in the DNS as of 1999) as
bob1 through bobN. Then came alt.tech-support.recovery, and
it was filled with Demon support personnel. They
all referred to themselves, and to others, as `bob', and after a while it
caught on. There is now a
Bob Code
describing the Bob nature.
