back to article Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

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 …

  1. b0llchit Silver badge
    Coat

    And, apparently, he made a clean getaway.

    1. Ken Shabby Bronze badge
      Facepalm

      My guess is that he said “Fuck” quietly under his breath

      1. sev.monster

        Not so clean now, Izzy?

      2. jake Silver badge

        Maybe not. I've been saying "dadGUMMIT!" instead, since my daughter was born.

        Although she's been slowly re-programming me these last nearly 40 years.

      3. Bebu
        Childcatcher

        Not today...

        "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."

    2. aerogems Silver badge
      Coat

      But not after much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Stories from Grandad

    Is this some kind of time machine publication? Are we getting stories from bygone days of the yester years due to ElReg Time machine??? :'D

    1. Flightmode
      Pint

      Re: Stories from Grandad

      I think it's more a statute of limitations thing...

      Also;

      > ...containing "20 odd women" though tragically he did not specify in his email exactly how odd they were.

      Gorgeous twist!

      1. Korev Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: Stories from Grandad

        > ...containing "20 odd women" though tragically he did not specify in his email exactly how odd they were.

        Gorgeous twist!

        Unless maths has changed since I was at school, then I'm pretty sure that 20 is an even number...

        1. TDog

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          Ah, but each one of the women is a singleton, hence the classification as 'odd'

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Stories from Grandad

            >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...

            1. Boris Dyne

              Re: Stories from Grandad

              In the sixties spinisters I knew often shared an apartment with another spinister. As a child, I considered this very practical, prudent and companioniable. Then, in 1983, a light bulb went on in my head, the other shoe fell and the penny dropped all at once.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Stories from Grandad

            And, purely from a statistical point, each of them was bound to be on the unusual side in at least some respect. Or as I tell people: "you are unique, just like everyone else"

        2. heyrick Silver badge

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          There's an alternative explanation - "twenty odd" meaning "about twenty but I don't know the exact number".

          1. Jonathan Richards 1 Silver badge

            Re: Stories from Grandad

            Explaining a joke causes it to collapse into, er, a non-joke. Pedants will point out that it should then have been twenty-odd hyphenated women (digits in written language being frowned upon), and then we would have laughed. Maybe, but probably not.

            1. Contrex

              Re: Stories from Grandad

              Style guides generally advise using words for numbers smaller than some limit, often 11. So a six-day war, but a 21-gun salute.

              1. Martin-73 Silver badge

                Re: Stories from Grandad

                Yes but style guides also suggest using incorrect spellings and punctuation, as shown in this publication frequently nowadays.

              2. carolinahomes

                Re: Stories from Grandad

                Surely I've seen 'dozen' written more often than '12'. Let's go with that limit as being smaller than 13 rather than 11.

                (Plus I must mention the written formula: Two + eleven - one = TwØelɇven̷ )

                1. Flightmode

                  Re: Stories from Grandad

                  Mind. Thoroughly. Blown.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Stories from Grandad

              It's improper to discuss the presence or absence of women's hyphens.

        3. Kev99 Silver badge

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          I worked for several years with 9 odd women. And, BOY! Were they ever!

          1. Huw L-D

            Re: Stories from Grandad

            "I worked for several years with 9 odd women. And, BOY! Were they even!"

            Seems more appropriate.

            1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge
              Joke

              Re: Stories from Grandad

              I can't even. :-(

        4. Robert Carnegie Silver badge
          Joke

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          "A round twenty women" is sizeist, as someone may have said already. :-)

    2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Stories from Grandad

      It's stories from the future that need a time machine.

      1. Robin

        Re: Stories from Grandad

        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...

        1. sev.monster
          Pint

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          You think he maced his racing pace at the spacious space bar Spacebar for a trace of space pint? I hear they're might a few drops faint of a Mynt pint, and fright on the space spice that's oh so nice.

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
            Coat

            Re: Stories from Grandad

            You can't have beer in space. There's no specific gravity.

            The one with the gloves and helmet ------------->

            1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

              Re: Stories from Grandad

              That will be solved by then. Enjoy gravity!

            2. JRS

              Re: Stories from Grandad

              And the pub on the moon's not very good.

              There's no atmosphere.

        2. Fr. Ted Crilly Silver badge

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          I prefer Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish myself, polysyllabic as well which gets it all out in one go etc.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          >Cast your minds back to the 2130s. It was 25pm and Tony had barely started

          You mean we still have printers in 2130, and they are still not reliable?

          Now, that is a depressing thought.....

          1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

            Re: Stories from Grandad

            It's a 4-D printer. If you start printing before you fix it, but then you don't fix it, you have an unresolvable paradox.

            Or even a Grandfather paradox.

            After all, if it's printing, then they don't call you, to fix it, so they can print...

    3. jake Silver badge

      Re: Stories from Grandad

      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.

      1. FIA Silver badge

        Re: Stories from Grandad

        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!!)

        1. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
          Devil

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          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

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: Stories from Grandad

            I suppose you'd switched it off at the mains so he'd lean over to see why it wasn't working.

            1. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

              Re: Stories from Grandad

              You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment.

            2. Fr. Ted Crilly Silver badge

              Re: Stories from Grandad

              And a nudge with the cattleprod.... Bingo!

        2. Martin Gregorie

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          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.

        3. Mark 85

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          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.

        4. JulieM Silver badge

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          A Salbutamol inhaler in the pocket is no less effective at warding off evil spirits than the tie it gives you a medical exemption from wearing, just saying .....

        5. jake Silver badge

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          "(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.

      2. WolfFan

        Re: Stories from Grandad

        And that kind of thing is why I never wore a tie in the machine room. Still don’t. Actually, I rarely wear ties at all.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          Funerals and interviews only!

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          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!)

        3. ShortLegs

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          What is a tie?

          Joking. I remember them, vaguely. Kids today dont

      3. rafff

        Re: Stories from Grandad

        IBM used to insist on FSEs wearing a suit and tie, regardless of how dirty the job. Then elfin safety came in.

      4. I could be a dog really Silver badge
        Headmaster

        Re: Stories from Grandad

        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.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Stories from Grandad

          Warning on laser in a lab:

          DO NOT LOOK IN LASER WITH REMAINING EYE

          Rather effective, that...

    4. Caver_Dave Silver badge
      Joke

      Re: Time machine

      I got bored with my time machine after a few years and so I am not now going to invent it next Thursday.

    5. martinusher Silver badge

      Re: Stories from Grandad

      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....)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Stories from Grandad

        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.

      2. mdubash

        Re: Stories from Grandad

        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...

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Stories from Grandad

        "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.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I bet he'd love to wipe that incident from his memory.

    I wonder if his boss made him Pledge not to do it again, or did he have to polish up his CV?

    1. FIA Silver badge

      Does it matter?

      He'd glide into any job he applied for, having sheen off the competition.

  4. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    It was a shining example of how not to add a sparkling finish to a job.

  5. Howard Sway Silver badge

    we are once again hearing from "Edgar" who has regaled us before with tales

    "Hegel says somewhere that great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: “Once as tragedy, and again as farce.”

    Karl Marx - The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

  6. disgruntled yank Silver badge

    Only self-damage

    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.

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: Only self-damage

      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.

    2. Blofeld's Cat
      Facepalm

      Re: Only self-damage

      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 ...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Only self-damage

        PHB -> Pointy Handed Boss?

        1. BartyFartsLast Silver badge

          Re: Only self-damage

          Perforated Hand Boss

      2. J.G.Harston Silver badge

        Re: Only self-damage

        At least he didn't look down the business end.....

      3. Aussie Doc
        Coat

        Re: Only self-damage

        Whoa!

        Nailed it.

        As 'they' say.

        Extra nails in my pocket ---------------------->

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Only self-damage

        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.)

        1. PRR Silver badge

          Re: Only self-damage

          > 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

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: Only self-damage

            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.

    3. I could be a dog really Silver badge
      Stop

      Re: Only self-damage

      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" !

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Only self-damage

        "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 ...

  7. The commentard formerly known as Mister_C Silver badge
    Coat

    Shame it wasn't an old calculator

    He could've set it to Reverse Polish

  8. Luiz Abdala
    Joke

    A sturdier machine...

    ...would have shredded the cloth, like some printers I heard were capable of chewing through a tie, and the neck attached with it, with aplomb. Clip-on ties were invented for a reason.

    Perhaps the cleaning rag was more up to spec than the printer.

  9. This post has been deleted by its author

  10. CatBoy

    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 ;-> )

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Nah, modern life has got too boring with all the people out looking for excuses as to why someone else ought to be offended.

  11. I could be a dog really Silver badge
    Facepalm

    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.

  12. MarkMLl

    How the Hell did he manage that???

    The TC500 decoders were sealed units with the electromagnetic clutches and brakes running in an oil bath.

    If a rag got into it... well, all I can say is that https://xkcd.com/463/ applies.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: How the Hell did he manage that???

      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 ...

    2. Rtbcomp

      Re: How the Hell did he manage that???

      There was a pulley/timing belt on the decoder which drove a jackshaft which ran the width of the machine, the favourite trick was to leave a timing shaft in place and switching the machine on, but a rag in the timing belt would do the trick!

  13. PRR Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Yeah, I been told not to bleed on the (newspaper-sized) negatives.

    > 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.

  14. Lopan

    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.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like