return to
Techmas home

Favorite Techmas carols

• How Come There Is No Manual?
• Virtual Christmas
• 12 Days of (Microsoft) Christmas
• Bring a Disc
• The Bill Gates Song
• God Rest Ye Copland Programmers
• Not So Merry (Gentlemen)
• MIPS to the World
• Microsoft
• Jingle Bell (AOL)
• COBOL Coder
• Little Home Computer
• Perl White
• Blue Screen

Nights Before Christmas

• Computer Christmas
• Hacker's version
• Internet version
• Night Before Implementation
• Night Before Start-up
• Shift Before Christmas
• Silicon Impostor
• Worm Before Christmas

Man page for Christmas

Is Santa a sysadmin? You be the judge...

Shift Before Christmas

Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the house
Not a user was stirring
Or clicking a mouse.

And the condoms we'd set
By the white board with care
In the hopes that the desperate
Would get out of our hair.

The clueless were sleeping
In their dorms, on their beds
As problems and questions
Evolved in their heads.

And Help on the RT
And I on my Mac,
Had just settled in
For a long winter's hack.

When on top of the Qube
There arose such a clatter
I rushed through the door
To see what was the matter.

And alone, in the lobby,
Dressed in red and off-white:
A consultant named Toby
Who'd stayed up late that night.

He stacked up some presents
Near the kiosk with care,
Then saw me, and smiled,
Then ran out of there.

As he mounted his sleigh
And rode off into rain,
He hailed to his servers
And called them by name:

'On Cactus! On Classrooms!
On Consheap and Champlin!
On Cluster! On Novell!
On LanRes and GradCen!"

And finally, he called,
As he rode out of sight:
"Save often! Make copies!
And sleep some, all right?"

By Arne "ACK!" Knudson, Jeremy "Gaffer" Gaffney, Chris "crism" Maden, Lee "Pandion" Silverman, Mike "MichaelSoft" Johnson