User:SecretAgent/Becoming an Oper

The sort of questions which ChatX staff can be guaranteed to get year in and year out are "How do you choose opers?", and "How do I become one?".

In an attempt to shed some light into the murky world of ChatX Opers, we followed Damien, a new oper on the olympus.chatx.net server, through the process of turning from user to oper.

"What struck me most about Damien was his friendly chat", says SecretAgent, the Admin of olympus.chatx.net "Well, that and his dark good looks..."

Damien impressed Admins with his friendliness

"We need more talkative opers on this network, so I invited him to be an opers"

With an offer of an O:line under his belt, Damien then had to ensure that he forefilled the other requirements of being an oper, such as signing up to the appropriate mailing lists.

The next stage in any new recruit's life is to be trained in the arts of being an oper. For this they attend classes with the training team.

"Well he came to us for training recently and went through all the usual tests and instructions" PJKevin, the Oper Training team leader, told us "He seemed to absorb it all well and had a wonderfully sharp eye and fast reactions."

Having passed his training, Damien was now a fully fledged ChatX Oper and, with his access added, soon went to work setting /kill's on anyone who broke ChatX rules....or who owned a cat.

Doing your first /kill can be scarey

"I am so proud of him", says SecretAgent "Damien displays all the qualities I look for in an oper and if he doesn't know something, he just wings it. No, he really hasn't put a foot wrong...well, apart from that little incident when he /kill'd Area51..."

We later found out that the incident SecretAgent referred to was actually a bit of a misunderstanding. It seems that the ChatX Founder, Area51, made a passing comment about liking his birds to have a big breast which Damien took the wrong way. When we talked to Damien about this incident he said he didn't have time to comment and had to fly.

Damien is contrite after accidentally autokilling all of AOL

We caught up with Damien again three months later to see how he was getting on and found that he was now totally adjusted to life as a ChatX Oper. He has mastered the art of setting /away and auto-responding to all messages with "Please go to #help for help".

Damien now an experienced Services Administrator on duty