[deanCommie]

A good story, I think a lot of us have at least one story like that of interactions with the technologically-inept.

But I wanted to ask you about your use of the term "flipping the bozo bit". I've seen others use that as a derisive way towards people they think less of, but curiously the source of this expression is prescribing precisely NOT doing this behaviour:

> McCarthy's Rule #4 is "Don't Flip The Bozo Bit". McCarthy's advice was that everyone has something to contribute — it's easy and tempting, when someone ticks you off or is mistaken (or both), to simply disregard all their input in the future by setting the "bozo flag" to TRUE for that person. But by taking that lazy way out, you poison team interactions and cannot avail yourself of help from the "bozo" ever again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit

[loup-vaillant]

Well, retrospectively, I'm not sure I should have flipped that bozo bit. I just remember that I did, at least as far as computers were concerned. (My bozo bits tend to have 2 entries: a person and a subject matter.)

More generally, though, it was one of those unmistakable proofs that authority isn't always legitimate. This happened often enough that I now decide for myself who has authority over me.