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Comment by lb1lf | Hacker News Reader

Dr. Strangelove is the origin of what I consider the most brilliantly absurd one-liner in cinematic history.

'Gentlemen, you can't fight in here - this is the war room!'

My work would insist on calling the incident response or monitoring room a "war room". And I would quote this every time it was mentioned. It gets old, but I literally can not stop myself from repeating the quote when i hear the phrase "war room".

We had a major incident go down during our Christmas party, of the "We've got $50M of payload slamming into a wellhead at 1,400m, please advise" variety.

Our service hotline was overwhelmed, and promptly proceeded to provide the rather irate (for very valid reasons!) customer the personal cell numbers of half the engineering departement.

Thus, as we were in a bar in advanced stages of inebriation, all of our cell phones started ringing. Oops.

The bartender was brilliant, realizing that something very out of the ordinary had just happened, came over, got the basics from a panicking engineer, threw the other guests out of the pool /pinball lounge at the back, put on coffee (lots!), found some paper and pens and left us to sort it out as best as we could.

The disbelief at the customer end as they heard Motörhead in the background while we were on the phone with them? Priceless.

We eventually had a couple of laptops taxied in and set up a sort of proper war room, still with Motörhead blaring in from the bar.

Good times. We even got the system offshore going again before the wellhead called it quits.

I've also had a customer service desk rep give my personal cell number to a customer. Fun times. Chalk it up to "cultural differences": the CSD rep simply could not understand why I might be incensed that a debt collection agency who believes I am singularly responsible for some hiccup in their collection software now has a direct line to me.

There are euphemisms for everything.

Senior citizens, defense department, correctional facility, adult entertainment...

Dr Strangelove is an absolute classic. The flight and build up to the bomb drop is both comic and tense. The finale with the bloke riding the bomb like a bucking bronco is near genius: slapstick armageddon. I think I need to watch it again.

There are quite a few contenders for your award. Might I proffer:

"I'm Brian and so's my wife"

It was a Dadaist film, through and through. Wrong time period, but the influences are striking, down to Strangelove's own physical appearance [1]. Interesting thing to have caught my eye while I was reading about something else entirely.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada , specifically the painting in front of Hanna Höch. It's almost unthinkable that Kubrick or Peter Sellers didn't run across this image at some point.

Although not a one-liner, I'm partial to:

"Buck, should I get it?"

"Yeah, you have to!"

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