
And, apparently, he made a clean getaway.
Welcome once again, dear reader, to Who, Me? – the Reg's Monday morning pick-me-up that aims to cushion your entry to the working week by sharing stories of fellow readers' narrow escapes from their own errors. This particular Monday we are once again hearing from "Edgar" who has regaled us before with tales of his time …
"My guess is that he said “Fuck” quietly under his breath"
The women today, odd or just assorted, would have likely rated the poor chap with more Fs and Cs etc than his delicate ears might be accustomed. Back then odd perhaps but "ladylike" probably yes resorting to such terrors as irony and sarcasm.
"Oooh, you are such a clever lad. You have really fixed it properly this time. I shouldn't think you will need to do that again."
>Ah, but each one of the women is a singleton, hence the classification as 'odd'
In the 70s, any unmarried woman over the age of 22 would automatically be characterized as a spinster and consigned to live the rest of her life with a collection of felines. Any married woman would have had to get her husbands permission to work...
It's stories from the future that need a time machine.
This week's submission comes telepathically from a reader we shall Regomise as Tony. Cast your minds back to the 2130s. It was 25pm and Tony had barely started his weekend of being on space-call, when the fluxcaller rang. "Oh Belgium!" he cursed as he threw his moonbeer to the floor, only to see it miss and float away. His space boss gave him the bad news that the space printer was on the blink again and he would have to go there in his space rocket...
Machines were more interesting back then, leading to better stories.
How many times can you read "windows barfed" or "the cloud evaporated"?
Or, I could talk about the IBM field service engineer who, back in '87 or so, got his tie stuck in a Cisco AGS router's cooling fans. Three times. In under three hours.
Or a similar IBM FSE that managed similar, but with an IBM 1403 printer in 1970ish.
Machines were more dangerous back then...
...oh... and ties.. everyone came fitted with a noose, it seems odd looking back.
...actually... thinking about it... maybe it's just the more interesting machines are more dangerous?
(but still.. the tie thing.... crazy!!)
They sure were...
Especially if you're a loathed middle mangler everyone despises and you happen to use the shredder.... and then you lean over it to flick the socket switch to 'on' and the shredder starts shredding the paper in its maw and your tie happens to get caught too.
Gave everyone in the office that day a jolly good laugh.
PS we did turn the shredder off to release him......... eventually
PPS there were a couple of votes to leave him there ... see icon
When I started work (1968 in an ICL service bureau, when all men wore shirts and ties in the office), it was easy to spot the longer-service engineers: those were the ones wearing bow ties.
The older engineers wore bow ties from habit because wearing the usual style of office tie (those optionally secured with a tie-pin) was inviting an accident if your job was maintaining card-punch data processing equipment such as sorters and tabulators: it was all too easy to get the end of your tie caught in a running sorter or tabulator and then woe betide you if the STOP switch wasn't within reach.
oh... and ties.. everyone came fitted with a noose, it seems odd looking back.
Some offices said long ties needed to be clip ons instead of the tied ones. Bow ties could be eitehr. Rather archaic but the clip on was the tie of choice. Happily, many places just started ruling that "no ties" for the IT staff.
"(but still.. the tie thing.... crazy!!)"
Indeed. There's a reason that ties were fair game for anyone with a pair of scissors at most early (mid '70s) Silly Con Valley companies ... hand-built one-off prototypes often had voracious cooling fans. The theory was that if we starved 'em of ties they'd be too weak to do much other damage. Not even IBM Field Circus folks were safe from the shears ... HP, somewhat wisely, decided ties were pretty useless fairly early on, as did DEC's Palo Alto contingent. Most of the other big names followed. Some of the Military Brass working out of Ford Aerospace, Varian & etc. had special dispensation to do without neck-ware "so they'd fit in with the locals" ... We had high hopes that it'd become a world-wide movement and we'd be done with the useless things for good.
The only real use for a tie is as a handle when trying to shake sense into the wearer.
Only ever had one tie accident.
When I was young and stupid.
Involved a bench drill in a workshop. Think I was reaching over to pull the big winding handle/lever.
I had the bruises and bash on the side of my face for ages afterwards. still hurts when i think about it. Lucky I didn't lose any teeth.
Thank goodness the big red stop buttons are sensitive enough with one hand flailing about to hit it.
Always removed ties before going close to any machine after that, but have not needed to wear one for best part of 30 years or so now. (wear a tie, that is, not a drill press!)
I recall from my university days back in ... well it was a looong time ago. The Digital Equipment (yes, it was pre-DEC days) had a notice under the cover warning (don't recall teh exact wording now) to keep personal items such as neckties and fingers out of the way of the moving gubbins. I was always amused by the way it included fingers as personal items rather than body parts.
Its that the overall reliability of hardware is so good now that you don't need the kinds of field services you had 'back when I were a lad'. Today's SNAFUs are primarily the work of software, either yet another routine update that's gone belly up or some malware that's found its way into the system. It can be as devastating but invariably nothing like as anecdotally interesting.
(I suppose in the future old timers will reminisce about the "the time I loaded a web page and it didn't have a coding error in it" or something....)
Modern hardware is solid state and often doesn't offer scope for proper repair. My dad was a CCTV engineer for years. Designed and built systems for the small company he worked at (including one system that was installed in virtually every ASDA & Sainsburys back in the 90s). When they were bought out by a larger rival he primarily became a service engineer.
He still enjoyed his work until a few years before his retirement. All his service calls then were basically drive to a site and swap something out instead of actually repairing stuff, which he found incredibly dull.
Tell that to my home colour laser printer. I had wastefully to bin it because one tiny piece of plastic - the part that secures the flappy paper sensor - broke, so it refused to believe there wasn't a paper jam. I explained it to the machine on multiple occasions, and even 3D printed a replacement but all for naught. A new printer cost only £250...
"Its that the overall reliability of hardware is so good now that you don't need the kinds of field services you had 'back when I were a lad'"
No. Whole concept of "repairing" has been tossed into a bin and now, when something breaks, you toss it away and buy a new one. Thus, not many field service repair men needed, pure mainframe stuff.
On the other hand ICs aren't really repairable, broken ones are just trash.
Many many years ago, I put in a couple of weeks filling in for a friend doing paste-up at a company that did computer animation. One day, having cut something or another to my satisfaction, I pulled the xacto knife away with a flourish, which ended up about the midpoint of my right quad. There was not much damage, for such knives are very small, but I suppose that I learned some caution that day.
Watched a women at work a while back trying to stab a thermometer into a frozen thingummy. Getting increasingly agitated, stabbing increasingly more forcefully...
...until the moment of instant regret when the frozen thing finally gave way in the way that frozen things are wont to do, and the driven pointy end kept right on going since flesh is decidedly softer.
I'm reminded of a PHB who, needing to pin up a chart in his newly refurbished office, borrowed a contractor's Paslode nailer while he was at lunch. Like most nailers the machine will not operate unless it is in contact with a surface - an important safety feature for something that can pin battens to steel girders.
The PHB didn't know this so when he "test fired" it nothing happened. Thinking it was broken he patted the business end ...
A former co-worker once worked in the construction industry, and related the time he saw his boss, in front of the entire crew, absentmindedly scratch the back of his head with a framing nailer. Which obliged by firing. My co-worker then related that construction workers have no sense of humanity - they all laughed at him.
(I'm under the impression the boss recovered fine after having the hospital remove the nail.)
> scratch the back of his head with a framing nailer. ....recovered fine after having the hospital remove the nail.
Google it. There's an old-old X-ray of dozens of nails in a guy's head. And there was a news item very recently where a guy went to hospital because he could not remember why he had a nail in his head. several hits - nailgun murder
I watched a guy pin-nail his hand to his inner thigh, just above his left knee. An acquaintance from the harbo(u)r wandered into a boat remodel, sat down on the deck, picked up the nailer and fired 6 times. Senco AX21, 2inch 16ga brads. Then he promptly fainted.
Turned out he was tripping, a rather large dose of LSD combined with coke. Not recommended.
Got him to the hospital before he came to, thankfully. Surprisingly little blood. Still not recommended.
He made a full recovery, no tendon damage(!), and came back to apologized to us ... I'm STILL not recommending it.
He did manage to pick up a new nickname ... we call him Brad these days.
I was running an IT business waaay back in the early days of DTP when they (our client doing tech. pubs, specifically maintenance manuals for a large construction machinery vendor) would get "prints" back from the imager and still have to paste up the pages. If anyone cut themselves with a scalpel, there would be a cry of "don't bleed on the bromides" !
"Be careful! Blood doesn't dry the same colo(u)r as rubylith, and the customer will bitch about it!"
And besides, dried blood cracks easily & lets light through. Doesn't mix well with hot wax, either.
Strangely for a computer nerd, I actually enjoy old-fashioned paste-up ...
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Never was I so scared as when I had to go to Birds-Eye Frozen Foods - East London. An almost all-female workforce in the factory who used more Fs, Cs,,Bs and Z's (the full alphabet of obscenities) ... more than the entire crew of HMS Ark Royal would use in an entire year... all in 15 minutes.
and of course, the most fun the ladies had was to make the poor 18-year-old techy almost run out the door due to embarrassment from all the suggestive comments whilst he was trying to fix the printer...
ahh the 80s.. I hope this doesn't still happen... I'm scared for life (probably ;-> )
Ahh, reminds me of a story my late father used to tell. He was an electrician in the midlands, doing repair work in various places.
One job he got called to involved a long bench of sewing machines, driven by a line shaft under the bench and a motor at one end. He opened the lid to the box enclosing the motor expecting to find it clogged solid with lint - but instead found it spotlessly clean. Turns out the ladies took pride in keeping the whole setup clean and tidy - including opening the box and cleaning the motor etc. every Friday afternoon. Back then, the motor was somewhat open framed - apparently the ladies even cleaned "that shiny brass bit at the end", i.e. the commutator and brushgear, while it was running.
Nowhere did TFA say anything about TC500s
Regardless, the story was that the rag got into the mechanism between the encoder and the print head, jamming it, causing the encoders to operate outside their design tolerances, thus trashing them.
The real gripe should be that TOA seemingly forgot to plug the overload circuitry back in ...
> Except that he missed the toolbag, and sent the cloth flying into
No IT content, so just telling tales. I brought my 5 pound 2 foot sledgehammer into work for some well-forgotten reason. Possibly pounding mounting holes in concrete-- hammer-drills were still huge pneumatic affairs and I could pound a star-drill by hand.
Pounding done I took it back to the car, set it on the front seat. It slid, the head went straight down, the handle levered on the edge of the seat, WAP it smacked the windshield fast enough to crack it. And a 1979 Thunderbird is one of the largest windshields of any sedan (and it was only a 2-door). Nobody's fault but mine.
Back in the old days of line printers and such, I was the computer operation supervisor on a banking system that had a
printer page separator or burster as it was known, the damn thing had stopped on me and I started looking inside as to why.
Like any idiot I stuck my hand in there to get a tiny piece of paper out and get it going again.
I didn't unplug the beast before I did that and it started by itself and munched my left hand.
Took off the end of middle finger and broke the ends of the rest. What fun. Not
Now I have a somewhat screwed up middle finger but all in all I got lucky.