Editing 705: Devotion to Duty

Jump to: navigation, search

Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.

The edit can be undone. Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision Your text
Line 8: Line 8:
  
 
==Explanation==
 
==Explanation==
βˆ’
This comic is a reference to the 1988 movie Die Hard, where several supposed terrorists have taken hostages inside the fictional building Nakatomi Plaza. They take over the building, and cut all communication to prevent anyone communicating with the outside world. The goatee that the man has is a reference to Hans Gruber, the main antagonist in Die Hard. In the original movie, NYPD detective John McClane (who was in the building at the time) famously climbs through ventilation ducts and walks across broken glass. A major plot point is that the antagonists communicate through radio, just like this comic. In the original movie, he kills many of the antagonists and manages to rescue most of the hostages, foiling their plan in the process.
+
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 {{w|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.
  
βˆ’
However, in this comic, instead of freeing the hostages, the individual mentioned instead reconnected the servers to the outside world. The person on the other end of the phone, immediately recognizes the reason: the man that entered the building is a sysadmin (short for {{w|system administrator}}), and he is concerned that his servers are losing uptime, or 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 ''{{w|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.
 
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.

Please note that all contributions to explain xkcd may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see explain xkcd:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!

To protect the wiki against automated edit spam, we kindly ask you to solve the following CAPTCHA:

Cancel | Editing help (opens in new window)

Templates used on this page:

Retrieved from "https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/705:_Devotion_to_Duty"