Before helpdesks had ticket numbers. Before users had rights. Before IT had “customer service skills.” There was root. Root Without Responsibility is the origin story of the legendary Bastard Operator From Hell — told from the machine room floor. From a bored university operator at University of Waikato armed with system passwords and plausible deniability… To late-night rants written on a scavenged TRS-80 Model 100 with 23K of memory… To the strange, electric days of Usenet, when the support staff outnumbered the lusers and revenge was measured in diskquota.