Nerd “Humor”

Wednesday, May 25, 2022

For those unfamiliar with Unix-like systems, many of them include a program called fortune which, to quote its documentation, will “print a random, hopefully interesting, adage.” I have one system, running OpenBSD (which ultimately traces its heritage to the Berkeley Software Distribution), which I have set to automatically run fortune on login. Just now I logged in and got:

For a good time, call (510) 642-9483

It turns out this is the fax machine in the office of the vice-chancellor for administration at Berkeley, presumably unchanged since whatever wit decided to put that into fortune’s list.