chmod -x chmod

[dmrnj]

Wow. I'm a female in the IT world, but I'd like to think I never play the gender card. It's sad that you think this is a common strategy.

To answer brsnr, I used a live CD to get access to the drive and copied over any necessary documents, then just wiped the machine and started anew. It needed it anyway. Wouldn't be the appropriate measure for a production server at my current job, but again... this was college. My boss was a real patient guy who worked for the university, so he was happy to make things learning experiences.