705: Devotion to Duty

Devotion to Duty

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Title text: The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it's nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog's servers.

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Explanation

In this comic, we see a man talking on a phone. We are unsure of his aims (terrorism, robbery, etc.) but he has taken hostages and cut all links to the outside world, in order to control the situation and prevent the police from observing the interior of the building (as popularly depicted in film and television). Initially, the villains seem to have everything under their control, but then the hostage-taker explains on the phone that someone has entered the building, climbed the air vents to bypass their cordon, effortlessly killing other hostage-takers (who are likely hardened killers with weaponry) on his way to the server room and then ignored the hostages, preferring instead to reconnect the servers to the outside world. The hostage-taker is evidently puzzled by this and explains it to the person on the other end of the phone, who immediately recognizes the reason: the man that entered the building is a sysadmin (short for system administrator), and he is concerned that his servers are losing uptime (time spent running or connected to the internet). This evidently concerns the man on the phone, who knows that a good sysadmin is an unstoppable force once started!

This comic is a reference to one of two things (or both): the Hollywood depiction of heroes able to perform superhuman feats in tricky situations (such as John McClane in Die Hard, which the first two panels are a deliberate reference to), or the duty that people impose upon themselves to go above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that they carry out their work (in this case a dutiful sysadmin, concerned for those trying to use his server).

The title text is a simple joke about the fact that the sysadmin will crawl through broken glass and defeat criminals/terrorists just so a cat blog (where owners write about their cats) can stay up. This creates a humorous contrast between the seriousness with which large websites treat issues like uptime and business continuity and the often mundane and banal uses people actually have for them.

A sysadmin is also mentioned in the title text of 309: Shopping Teams and in 1305: Undocumented Feature.

Transcript

[Bearded criminal is holding a pistol and talking on a mobile phone.]

Criminal: We took the hostages, secured the building and cut the communication lines like you said.

Phone: Excellent.

[Still talking on the phone, waving gun around in the air animatedly.]

Criminal: But then this guy climbed up the ventilation ducts and walked across broken glass, killing anyone we sent to stop him.

Phone: And he rescued the hostages?

[Criminal looking confused and defeated, shoulders hunched and pistol hanging limply at his side.]

Criminal: No, he ignored them. He just reconnected the cables we cut, muttering something about "uptime".

Phone: Shit, we're dealing with a sysadmin.

Trivia

This comic was made into a shirt in the xkcd store, which includes a new illustration on the back.

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Discussion

This is very clearly a Die Hard parody. -- ‎70.12.4.193 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Indubitably --JSekula71 (talk) 23:36, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Oh man. This needs some reworking. --Quicksilver (talk) 03:10, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

This entire entry has to be a troll... We may need an ExplainExplainxkcd for those who don't get it. 108.162.249.155 05:15, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

108.162.250.203 10:33, 26 April 2014 (UTC) In Die Hard, the terrorists used a chainsaw to cut the telephone trunk cables. Try repairing that damage.

Never underestimate the dedication of a truly devoted sysadmin! -Pennpenn 108.162.250.162 04:57, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

> terrorists used a chainsaw to cut the telephone trunk cables. Try repairing that damage. I've cut a 25-pair phone trunk with a masonry hammer-drill. And fixed it same night. --PRR (talk) 19:43, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

The title text is highlighting the absurdity of the sysadmin's devotion to duty by contrasting the forces of darkness (very serious) against a blog describing the daily activities of your cat (trivial). ---BD (talk) 07:36, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Why are there so many parentheses in the explanation? I think that needs to get fixed. Vince7778 (talk) 23:09, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous. 625571b7-aa66-4f98-ac5c-92464cfb4ed8 (talk) 05:15, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

It is 2024 - Where can I get the T-Shrt? 172.70.247.171 (talk) 14:39, 21 May 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The XKCD store was shut down years ago - 162.158.167.192 19:57, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

I wonder how they managed to read the sentence without understanding it's no longer available? --FaviFake (talk) 16:48, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

do we really need that last part about sysadmin references in title text if you can scroll to the bottom to find the sysadmin catagory? User_gamer (talk) 23:05, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

Two different purposes, technically.

The added membership of a category is for the benefit of that category page in which (although some have been given extensive narrative listings of the members-so-far, which may or may not be excessive) you mostly expect to find the autopopulated list of pointers to every page that is a member, including the one we're looking at here.

Links out from the page towards other comics for shared qualities are, even if that quality is a Category-created one, a technically more discerning linkage, which doesn't involve leaping to a Cat-page and then wikiwallking from there.

There may be significant overlap, especially when the Cat has only two or three members and all (the rest) of them get directly namechecked+linked on each member-page, but it needn't be. Such "<foo> is also found <elsecomic>" statements may be of the form "the most recent prior time we saw <foo> was <specificcomic>", or pointing at the first, or (once there is one) the next for easy reference. And more narratively than doing the InfoBar thing used to navigate the Blog-order or April Fools category-set.

Also see the practice of pointing to the likes of the Cueball page upon the first in-article mention of Cueball. It either might seem redundant if you suggest that Category:Comics featuring Cueball does the same job of providing a link (first to the Cat page, then click on the Cat page's link to the Character Page... or any other comic that features Cueball, if that's what will more satisfy your curiosity about this character), or else look like something that needs a new Infobar to navigate to the first/last/prior/next instances in the Cueball 'series'. But, I'm fairly sure, the direct link to the character-page (where notable enough) is both a sufficient and not excessive addition to the specific Category-membership about this that gets rendered at the end.

Or, in other terms, if you're right to suggest that we don't need this Sysadmin information effectively (pre)repeated like this, then there are many more very similar, or worse, anomalies out there in Explanation-land. If you think it's worth discussing this kind of prosaic layout-style element, then it probably needs more than a query here in this page to rectify any of this apparent oddness in content.

...My opinion being that it is an acceptable (even expected) redundancy of 'category-membership navigation'. But I wouldn't have thought to try to word why it is, without you asking this question an making me actually think about it. 81.179.200.152 23:50, 24 June 2026 (UTC)
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