\_ Another use of atime is disk grooming.  Rather
\_ than doing a BOFHish
What's wrong with that?

\_   rm -rf /home/john
\_ 
\_ to free up disk space, you could do
\_ 
\_   find /home/john -type f -atime +365 -exec rm -f {} \;
\_ 
\_ If you ain't accessed it in over a year, you
\_ ain't gonna miss it.

A true BOFH would disable atime "for performance reasons" and then a
year later run the command above.  "You clearly hadn't accessed the
file in over a year, the system *knows*."

:-)

David