Radar Riccardo

I have few users left here but what few there are make up for the dearth at times. One has been dubbed "Radar Riccardo" as he has an uncanny ability to call at the most inconvenient moment or when I'm in the least pleasant mood to deal with him. He especially likes to have a crisis when I have decided to take the day away from the office. He's a Type-A kind of user; a programmer who hasn't slept in the last decade who knows just enough Unix to be dangerous. His boss rolls his eyes and twitches at the mere mention of his name. Today's crisis came in at 7:05pm just as I was taking a shower and contemplating dinner. I decided to call him back for some clearly insane reason;

<ME> Yes Riccardo, what is it?
<RR> whumma whumma deleted files wumma wumma....
<ME> OK, let me guess...they weren't on the filer?
<RR> bee bop whoopdy no wumma whoop
<ME> How did you manage to delete 5 files of 40GB in size without noticing..this takes some time and talent Riccardo.
<RR>wub wub wooby whoop boo bap wrote a script beep boop poopy doopy overwrote the files...
<ME>You didn't test the script before randomly using on your production data?
<RR>wumma wumma under stress wumma umma uamm it's really importante ummma umma wumma need them restored tonight...
<ME>Riccardo you can do this yourself with the nwrestore command.... <RR> umma...15 minutes pass with him speaking out every command letter by letter
<ME>Stop, stop! Look, just send me an email with the exact name of the files you deftly removed with the path and the approximate timestamp and I'll just do this myself. Also, the next time you use -f on any command I won't answer my phone and I'll leave you to the help desk in Dallas...
<RR>ummma umma great let me know when they're restored umma umma umma <ME>Riccardo, this is 40GB on tape...go to dinner, watch some TV, get a nice long refreshing sleep tonight and it may be done by morning if you're in luck.
<RR>but..but..
<ME>Bye Riccardo.

He likes to go into long elaborate hostility generating detail about nothing. I could ask him a question like 'what command did you use?' and 20 minutes later I'd know all about some random unimportant detail about his boss but I'd still be waiting for the answer to my original question. I could open a ticket and get Wally the whistler whose job it is to mind the backup tapes and do restores but he usually moans about 'don't know much about unix' in spite of the fact that networker is all about the gui these days. It's just a lot less stress to do this myself and I'm the most highly paid tape jockey on the planet.

Users are good for reminding me why I smoked and drank heavily at times to maintain sanity. I haven't killed a user...yet.