More on the Waterbuffalo problem

Since my original post about Waterbuffalo to the scary devil monastery back at the beginning of July 1996 (eeeeek - has it really been that long ?) waterbuffalo started to appear everywhere. There was the news that supermarkets had started to sell waterbuffalo meat, which lead to me having the scary experience of seeing a ¼ page photo of a waterbuffalo looking out of a freezer in a newspaper on a Sunday morning. The fact that it was in the morning made it oh so much worse. This was the day after we'd gone around the British Museum (see later) finding waterbuffalo spies almost everywhere. I have also been told by Wednesday that there is a waterbuffalo song from a TV program she watched - where it said that everyone has to have a waterbuffalo. I was scared by this.

These days waterbuffalo are talked about less often; and when they are more people are asking about them. Thanks to the usual flux of people on newsgroups the scary devil monastery there are more and more people who don't know how dangerous waterbuffalo really are.

I've also heard that when some people read the original post they think that I really did have a waterbuffalo in the machine room of TCP Towers. All I can say to those people is would I really have a draft animal which can weigh around about 2000lbs with a horn span from tip to tip of 6ft in the tiny machine room at TCP Towers; a machine room that was about 8ft by 10ft filled to the brim with machines, routers and spaghetti networking ?

Somehow I don't think so. I made the entire thing up. Whilst I was dealing with a nasty database problem late a night caused by a clueless conslutant, the waterbuffalo was just a figment of my imagination. An imagination fueled by chocolate, caffeine, stress, lack of sleep and a chance comment by a friend via EMail.

All that friend did was to say "Ouch! That waterbuffalo must of hurt" in response to a "W|N>K" from me. That remark from me is a way of showing amusement at something that someone has said. Its normal form is for "C|N>K", which means Coffee through (or |) the N onto (or >) the Keyboard. After all, the scary devil monastery is a dangerous place to drink and read news. Dangerous for your keyboard at least. The C is often changed the first letter of the drink you were drinking; in my case water, thus the W. Kendall took it to mean waterbuffalo - I've got a feeling that he didn't know what I meant by the W and the first word that sprang to mind was "waterbuffalo". So its all his fault and that's the story that I'm sticking to.

Finally, before the post which answered someone's question about the waterbuffalo thing, here is a little photograph from a paper here in the UK published about a year ago. It accompanied an article about waterbuffalo being farmed on the edge of Salsbury plain - which has a large army firing range on it.

[bows] Simon the Stressed, the troll who escaped from TCP Towers, at your service. Yes, I started off the waterbuffalo thing - all I can say in my defense is that I was even more stressed than normal and suffering a real lack of sleep at the time. You can also blame Kendall who was responsible for putting the seed of the idea into my head.

Be thankful that you don't have to deal with it yourself... For a while it appeared that I was being chased by waterbuffalo everywhere. There were waterbuffalo spies following me around the British Museum (cunningly disguised as cows - they couldn't fool me tho) at an ASRLon. And as for the water buffalo in the pipes that dumps the halon-like[1] stuff into our machine room[2]... I keep on having these visions of the halon-like system going off and confused water buffalo dropping from the ceiling going "Moooooo". I'm seeing this from outside the machine room (which is glass-fronted). The machine room fills up with white gas which has waterbuffalo appearing and disappearing from view in strange positions going "Mooooo"[3]. The glass on the machine room then starts to crack and I start to run down the corridor away from the machine room. The glass breaks, filling the corridor with the white gas and waterbuffaloes at strange angles.

I'll not even begin to mention the island of waterbuffalo mid-atlantic which was caused by Kendall and I firing too many waterbuffaloes at each other via the net... they kept on colliding mid-atlantic and eventually they formed a small island (luckily the casing of the fibre stretches fairly well or we'd have a real problem clearing up the waterbuffalo contamination that leakage would cause in the ocean). The danger to shipping isn't that great as ships can hear the water buffalo gently Mooing in the night and so can make course changes.

Yes, I do probably need more sleep. Why do you ask ?

[1]	Its not halon, but does the same thing. AFAIR its called something like FM200 or similar.
[2]	This started off from a story from CamUni where plumbers grease was found to be in the pipes of their halon system. This was only discovered after the system had gone off and sprayed atomized grease all over the machine room. Naturally I thought "Now, what if water buffaloes were in the pipes instead ?" when I heard this. Although from the comments made by the CamUniBOFHs I'd say that the plumbers grease all over (and in) the machines was bad enough.
[3]	The scene in Akira were Tetuso brings the capsule the remains of Akira is stored in springs to mind. Just replace the pipes which feed the coolant into the capsule with water buffalo and you're about there :)

Just say NO to water buffalo

Never posted - written during 1997/1998