General Knowledge

1. You're in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Where do you go?
A. N
B. S
C. E
D. W
E. To lunch

2. Network utilisation figures are reaching an all time high for no apparent reason. This probably means:
A. You may have to look at chunkier routers
B. There may be some network card error
C. There may be some network monitoring error
D. Someone's found the MP3 stash!
E. They're leaving you out of Unreal Tournament just because they don't like fighting an invisible, invincible opponent with The Redeemer. The wimps!

3. Complete the series: 5V, 12V, 48V, 96V...
A. 127 Volts
B. 0 Volts
C. 24 Volts
D. 1 Amp
E. "AGHH AAAGHH! I'll tell you what you want to know!"

4. He who laughs last...
A. Laughs loudest
B. Laughs longest
C. Is a prat
D. Annoys the hell out of everyone
E. Hasn't seen the cattleprod

5. Which of the following is an industry standard substitute for a SIMM removal tool?
A. Nothing - there is no substitute!
B. A screwdriver
C. A car key
D. Some pliers
E. Banging on the motherboard with the back of your hand till the chip falls out

6. A CPU can generally be clock chipped to:
A. A small fraction above its rated speed
B. 10 per cent faster than its rated speed
C. 18.5 per cent above its rated speed
D. 70 per cent above rated, with a freon cooling and a death wish
E. 100 per cent, even more if its not your box

History

Are you an old bastard?

7. >Clunka Clunka Clunka< is the sound you would most associate with:
A. The clothes dryer
B. A washing machine with an imbalanced load
C. A flat tyre on your car
D. A tape safe door shutting repeatedly on an annoying user's foot
E. An imbalanced DEC RM05 Disk assembly moving around the computer room by itself during a head crash

8. You drop a screwdriver down a ventilation hole in the power supply at the back of a VAX 11/780. You expect:
A. A very careful removal process
B. A power supply failure
C. A nasty >crack< noise
D. Power outage to the computer room?
E. Looting of the shops in the two adjacent streets after the local transformer trips out

9. The nine-track tape you're using is having problems reading some very important survey data for some critical research - only getting half-way through the tape before failing. You would:
A. Clean the read heads, which probably are dirty
B. Have the tape sent to a commercial data recovery centre
C. A, then reduce the temperature of the computer room, and try to complete the read
D. Report the failure to the user
E. Just cut and repeatedly paste data from the beginning of the data file until the file's up to size

10. The greatest danger to the RA60 removable hard disk media was:
A. Not being locked into the drive spindle tightly
B. Not being able to be removed from the drive spindle after use
C. Disk damage if the cover lock unlatched itself during use
D. Dirty read heads
E. A preventative maintenance by the Engineer

11. The correct combination of carefully timed disk seeks on the drives in an RA80 disk drive rack could cause:
A. A 'tune' to play
B. A small vibration
C. A large vibration
D. A very large vibration
E. The disk rack to run in 'horizontal' mode

12. A user has been looking through the sad remnants of their life and found a large box of several thousand punch cards of their undergraduate work, which they would like you to do something with. A good administrator would:
A. Call a computer museum and get them read
B. Write a quick program to interface to a scanner and read them
C. Give the user the punch card hole code info so they could type them in
D. Throw them in the bin and tell the user that they've been demagnetised
E. Throw them at the user from a fourth-floor window

Finance

Are you an expensive Bastard?

13. The correct way to put a yearly budget plan together is to:
A. Add up the cost of all the expected projects and maintenance for the year to come and put that figure forward
B. Use last year's figure and add five per cent
C. Use the last year's figure as well as the previous year to discern a trend, and ask for that
D. Look at the performance bonus of the board members for an indication of potential
E. Multiply last year's budget by two after anonymously sending those photos from the Beancounter's photocopy room after the Christmas bash

14. A vendor tells you the product he's pushing will lower your TCO. This means:
A. Your total cost of ownership, taking into account purchase price, maintenance, expected lifetime and possible rental options, will be less
B. The TCO will probably not be affected, once you take training, early termination of previous contract and installation fees into account
C. He's on commission and things have been lean this year
D. He's a lying bastard
E. C, D and you can probably screw a few lunches out of him before you say no

15. An annual maintenance contract has come up for renewal and the Vendor takes pains to point out that they have not increased their charges like so many other vendors. This means:
A. They're trying to be competitive
B. A, and they're looking for extra business
C. They've found a subcontractor who will work for shiny beads and offal
D. They're scared of going into receivership after that anonymous letter to the tax dept
E. A, C, D, and they re-added those three extra pieces of equipment you cancelled maintenance on earlier in the year (due to an "administrative error")