Esoteric email messages

[fyffer]

I just received the following email from my boss (names changed to protect the guilty):

FYI. The machine mars has died. IT is trying to replace the motherboard. It will be gone for a few days. Crontabs have been updated to replace references to mars.

It struck me that that would sound *very* funny to someone having no idea what my job is all about.

Can anyone guess what the above means, or make up an amusingly convincing lie? Don't tell us if your really guessing, or BS-ing.

-Chris

[amar]

I haven't got the foggiest idea what that is supposed to mean!!


--> broken?

[jsluder]

I just received the following email from my boss (names changed to protect the guilty):

FYI. The machine mars has died. IT is trying to replace the motherboard. It will be gone for a few days. Crontabs have been updated to replace references to mars.

It struck me that that would sound *very* funny to someone having no idea what my job is all about.

Can anyone guess what the above means, or make up an amusingly convincing lie? Don't tell us if your really guessing, or BS-ing.

-Chris

It means:
The AI running the Matrix on Mars has crashed. The machines are trying to build a new mothership, but it will take a few days. In the meantime, all common-time tablature for Holst's Planets has been updated to replace references to Mars with banjo/bodhran duets called "Bars".

[emmline]

I just received the following email from my boss (names changed to protect the guilty):

FYI. The machine mars has died. IT is trying to replace the motherboard. It will be gone for a few days. Crontabs have been updated to replace references to mars.

The cyborg which goes by the stage name "mars" has just delivered a comic monologue which was so lame that the entire audience, except for C-3PO left.
Tim Curry, in bad clown makeup, has been put in charge of hardware updates. He knows nothing about computers, and has absconded with the relevant parts to Fiji, where it will, in fact, be repaired by a gifted masseuse/geek called Margaretta.
All staff members over the age of 55 are encouraged, nay required, to take the new company anti-Alzheimer's supplement, as there have been too many incidences of employees forgetting which comic cyborg is on stage at lunch hour.

[jsluder]

Tim Curry, in bad clown makeup, has been put in charge of hardware updates.

Ooh, good one! I completely missed the "It" reference! Once again, I am humbled before a greater clown.

[djm]

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and give as wild and crazy a response as I can think of at this hour of the day. The computer named "mars" at your company has crashed, and your Information Technology group is currently replacing the main circuit board on it. The reference to crontabs suggests that the operating system on some of your company's other servers is some flavour of *NIX, and that steps have been taken to ensure that automated routines that regularly connect to the computer called "mars" have been redirected or terminated so that no disruption in other regular procedures are interupted by the loss of the "mars" computer.

Happy happy happy happy happy happy ...

djm

[jsluder]

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and give as wild and crazy a response as I can think of at this hour of the day. The computer named "mars" at your company has crashed, and your Information Technology group is currently replacing the main circuit board on it. The reference to crontabs suggests that the operating system on some of your company's other servers is some flavour of *NIX, and that steps have been taken to ensure that automated routines that regularly connect to the computer called "mars" have been redirected or terminated so that no disruption in other regular procedures are interupted by the loss of the "mars" computer.

Happy happy happy happy happy happy ...

djm

Feck off! That's way too outlandish, even for this place!

[fearfaoin]

...The computer named "mars" at your company has crashed ... Unix ... blah, blah, blah

Damn, you beat me to it.
The IT guy at my last job was Greek, and he insisted on naming all
the machines after Greek gods. Nice to see some Roman-themed
boxes out there...

[Lambchop]

The thing that makes Mars, a computer, go whirr-ding broke, and the hardware people are replacing it, but it's ok because whatever used it won't.

Happy happy happy happy happy happy ...

Hmmm . . . .

[avanutria]

Having hung out with software engineering students for most of my undergrad degree, I wager that there is a computer in a cluster of many, and it is named Mars. (One of the labs at my school named their computers after all the major characters in Hitchhiker's Guide.) The computer named Mars is not functioning and the technicians are replacing a major component - the motherboard is the part that holds most of the other main bits like processor, ram etc.

I don't know what crontabs is short for, but I am guessing it's a bit of programming in the software that controls the whole group of computers, and anything that normally would have been routed to the Mars machine is being sent elsewhere till it's running again.

The fact that everything except the word crontabs made perfect sense to me illustrates the damage that can be done by having three software engineering roommates for two or three years...

Edit - oh well, I figured someone else would have gotten there first. But maybe I get extra points for knowing it and being female?

[Wanderer]

I don't know what crontabs is short for

crontabs is scheduling software for automated tasks. Chron, a unix task running daemon, checks chrontabs to see which tasks are scheduled to be run, and when. It's a unix/linux thing.

[Denny]

I don't know what crontabs is short for

crontabs is scheduling software for automated tasks. Chron, a unix task running daemon, checks chrontabs to see which tasks are scheduled to be run, and when. It's a unix/linux thing.

And only a geek would think that "task running daemon" made sense...

[jsluder]

I don't know what crontabs is short for

crontabs is scheduling software for automated tasks. Chron, a unix task running daemon, checks chrontabs to see which tasks are scheduled to be run, and when. It's a unix/linux thing.

And only a geek would think that "task running daemon" made sense...

A sys admin friend of mine has a cat named Daemon. (His other cat is named Smaug.)

[Walden]

Would that there were Mars Bar machines here.

[fyffer]

While this was a pretty good guess:

... . The computer named "mars" at your company has crashed...

And this was brilliantly terse:

The thing that makes Mars, a computer, go whirr-ding broke, and the hardware people are replacing it, but it's ok because whatever used it won't.

I'm afraid the winner is this one:

The cyborg which goes by the stage name "mars" has just delivered a comic monologue which was so lame that the entire audience, except for C-3PO left.
Tim Curry, in bad clown makeup, has been put in charge of hardware updates. He knows nothing about computers, and has absconded with the relevant parts to Fiji, where it will, in fact, be repaired by a gifted masseuse/geek called Margaretta.
All staff members over the age of 55 are encouraged, nay required, to take the new company anti-Alzheimer's supplement, as there have been too many incidences of employees forgetting which comic cyborg is on stage at lunch hour.

You win one of these:


Voting is not closed however, pending more humorous or accurate answers.