Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Every week is special in its own way, and The Register celebrates that fact by using Friday mornings to deliver a fresh installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column that shares your memories of managing IT messes someone else made. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ewen" who told us that in the early …

[Korev]

"Oh, the noise was annoying me," replied one of the testing engineers. "So I opened the case and cut the wires."

I bet Ewen wasn't his greatest fan

[b0llchit]

It will blow over.

[Mast1]

Re: It will blow over.

Reminds me of one bit in the book of railway disasters "Red for Danger" by LTC Rolt (mid 1950s edition).

One story involved a railyard worker who got fed up with the safety valve releasing excess steam while an engine was being fired up at the start of day, so he tightened the safety valve.

He was rewarded by one of his ears being sliced off by a piece of shrapnel when the boiler case finally gave up.

[Contrex]

Re: It will blow over.

Yes, and Rolt said the 'costive' loco got its revenge by doing that. Rolt was nothing if not lyrical about railway accidents; his description of Connington 1937, as I recall, said 'No. 2744 Grand Parade bore down upon the hapless stationary train'.

[David Hicklin]

Re: It will blow over.

Have an upvote as that is one of my favourite (and rather dog eared now) books.

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

I would be asking him to draught his resignation.

[Pascal Monett]

A testing engineer. An engineer.

This is not supposed to be your secretary making a photocopy of a floppy.

I hope the repairs were taken out of his salary (I know, wishful thinking).

[Will Godfrey]

Obviously the numpty wasn't a fan-tastic engineer.

[pirxhh]

Trust me, I'm an engineer

I indeed have photocopied floppy disks, to the utter bafflement (and amusement) of my peers.

In my defense, it was the easiest way to document which field office got which serial number (printed on the disks) of some software (Lotus SmartSuite, IIRC) so we could prove license compliance if needed.

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: Trust me, I'm an engineer

I love that lateral thinking -- doing a thing that's usually mockworthy, but quite deliberately and for a good reason.

I could see (though I never did it) folding a dead 5.25" floppy disk in half to prop up one leg of a rocky table.

That's somewhat akin to another thing that's always tickled me: getting behind a thing's symbolic value to the physical object itself. E.g. my favourite table stabilizer: pennies, back when Canada still had them. A couple of those were more effective than matchbooks, folded napkins or whatever. and inflation had made them far more valuable for preventing coffee spills than as actual currency...

[Vincent Ballard]

Re: Trust me, I'm an engineer

I used to use a big box of florins as a counterweight for a ceiling-mounted projector. It was a bodge, but it worked.

[Daedalus]

Re: Trust me, I'm an engineer

Good Lord, not even calling them 10p coins. I think we have a Methuselah here.

[Vincent Ballard]

Re: Trust me, I'm an engineer

Not calling them 10p coins because they were were 24d coins. Although I do also have a similar quantity of the old 10p coins which were the same size and weight.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Trust me, I'm an engineer

The Parliamentary Authorities still keep a box of pre-decimal pennies to adjust the Great Clock in the Elizabeth Tower (the one with a bell called Big Ben), as each one changes the length of the pendulum just enough to change by 0.4s per day.

[steviesteveo]

Re: Trust me, I'm an engineer

A lot of iphones have found themselves on photocopiers to produce a really neat court production - you can have cases like sexual harassment spelled out in one screen of messages and a photocopier turns that into a sheet of paper to distribute very quickly

There's so much to say for just putting a picture of something on a sheet of paper

[Antron Argaiv]

Retired EE here.

You'd be surprised at the number of mechanical engineers who don't understand how to cool electronics. Simply putting a heat sink on a part is not enough, you need to have airflow over it, in the direction of the fins, with cool air. And that air needs to come IN to the enclosure, but it also needs to go OUT. Adding a fan without a way for the warm air to leave the enclosure won't do the job. And hot air rises, so it's helpful to put the air intake at the bottom and the exit at the top -- and those openings need to be approximately the same area.

There's a great book on the subject, called "Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks", by Tony Kordyban.

[Gene Cash]

I had to read that title 3 times to catch it... Mr. Kordyban deserves one of these.

[PRR]

> I had to read that title 3 times

I had to buy it. Is good read.

[PB90210]

Building and testing a network of Cisco 6509s, each the size of an under-the-counter fridge, for a customer. Lined them up, powered them up and left them for a couple of hours to 'burn in'

Came back to discover half were throwing up errors. They had full height fan trays but unfortunately they were mounted on the side (probably to reduce the depth slightly) and I had lined them up in a neat row (with gaps between them, I'm no fool, erm!) and the fan trays just were sucking in cool-ish air and blowing hot air out and into the next chassis!

It was also shut in an unairconditioned room (because of the noise)... with no opening windows... on the hottest day of the year!

[Doctor Syntax]

That's the way to burn them in.

[C R Mudgeon]

Or burn them out...

[Scene it all]

When I started university an EE degree took 5 years and included a required course on thermodynamics. Reports from upperclassmen was that this course was a real bear as the Prof was more focused on the calculus than on getting you to understand heat transfer intuitively. Fortunately for me, halfway thru they revised the curriculum to reduce it to a more normal 4 years but this required you to choose a sub-specialty. Mine was "computer engineering" (heavy on software, less on building the things) and did NOT require the Thermo course. I am still mindful of cooling and always install the "optional" heat sinks and things even on little Single Board Computers.

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Ref Antron A above "And that air needs to come IN to the enclosure, but it also needs to go OUT"

Also applies to bathroom extraction fans.

Close-fitting door closed? Check.

No other means for fresh (drier) air to enter room to replace what the fan is trying to remove (apart from maybe a window cracked open right next to the fan such that the resultant airflow short-circuits & avoids scavenging any damp air on it's way through)? Check.

Now tell me again why you think that the fan is faulty?

[Dave K]

Thankfully it was a breeze to fix...

[Doctor Syntax]

That depends on what components got cooked.

[Doctor Syntax]

That's not cool.

[Bebu sa Ware]

WTF

"Oh, the noise was annoying me," replied one of the testing engineers. "So I opened the case and cut the wires."

Clearly that "engineer" hadn't been adequately tested before being certified.

Hopefully Mr Snippy doesn't go on to work in a nuclear powerstation^† as he obviously wasn't the business end of a screwdriver.

Even you though you know you will regret asking, the question I would pose to this budding Einstein is "why do you think the fans you knobbled were included in the design in the first place?" The only coherent answer I might imagine, if not quite rational: "just to annoy me." If the answer were along the lines that he believed removing cooling fans would cause the hardware to thermally limit its performance then that is only slightly less insane.

I suppose a decade or so later with the advent of ipods etc playing into earphones at 120dB this chap and fellow travellers would be as deaf as doorpost and untroubled by screaming fans although undoubtedly still as daft as a brush.

_{† those facilities' alarms are known to be a tad annoying. Funny that.}

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Re: WTF

† those facilities' alarms are known to be a tad annoying. Funny that.

Can confirm, as I live near a nuclear power station.

They make even more annoying noises when they restart a reactor and the steam valves start to blow...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WTF

Worry when you see the blue flash... or not.

[ChoHag]

Re: WTF

If you can see anything worth worrying about, it's already too late.

[druck]

Re: WTF

Hopefully Mr Snippy doesn't go on to work in a nuclear powerstation

Which have continuous alarms which chirp every few seconds. If you can no longer hear it, something has gone wrong.

[I could be a dog really]

Re: WTF

But I believe most people quickly "tune out" the cuckoo.

Reminds me of an old joke about a chap that buys a house not too far from a lighthouse. In the early hours of every morning, the foghorn blows - and he wakes up with a "WTF was that ?". Eventually he gets used to it and sleeps through it.

Until one day, the foghorn is broken and doesn't blow - he wakes up at the time it should have gone off and exclaims "WTF was that ?"

[Anonymous Coward]

At my place of work

That "engineer" would be shown the door at the next semi-annual layoffs. (The company has layoffs every January & June. Like clockwork.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: At my place of work

So agree ... how can you justify snipping the wires to the fans when you MUST know they are there for a reason.

If you don't know then you are not a good enough engineer and are no longer required.

If you do know but don't care because it is not your kit and you are not responsible for it then you lack of care/responsibility also makes you no longer required.

I have worked with some arrogant engineers etc BUT they had the skills/knowledge that earned then that right ... up to a point ... BUT this attitude is a little too far !!!

Usually the attitude was somewhat changed when the 'tin box with all the noisy fans' was made known to cost a few £100K because it contained custom one off hardware etc

i.e. don't touch if you don't want to pay for it !!!

:)

[blu3b3rry]

Re: At my place of work

Those sorts of engineers can be very bright in their own way, but equally their greatest achievements appear to be dressing themselves and managing to make it to work unaided.

At least two I dealt with over the years gave the strong impression that their mothers still tied their shoelaces and zipped their jackets up before they left the house.

It's fun watching them go pale when you explain just how expensive the stuff they've broken was.

Then you have the fackwits like the one in the article who shouldn't be trusted with a teaspoon, never mind any kind of actual tools.

[Martin an gof]

Re: At my place of work

And what kind of engineer snips cables which presumably could just as easily be unplugged?

M.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: At my place of work

An "I'm an engineer. I use tools." engineer.

[ITMA]

Re: At my place of work

"is a tool" more like it....

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: At my place of work

I've worked with that sort before. One guy had enough degrees to wallpaper a small room, was a bona fide degreed nuclear engineer, but it took me forever to pound basic troubleshooting for fiber gear into his head. He finally caught on after a year or so. Nice guy, but a little odd upstairs. I'd be concerned about him even handling a 1940s radium watch, much less a pile of hot uranium. I suspect he landed the degrees he did by being a good test taker.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: At my place of work

Back in the day the Home Office had a Forensic Sience research lab on the site of a nuclear research site - for all I know they still do. I only visited it a few times which was more than enough. There was accommodation on-site and I was told some of the nuclear staff lived there permanently and that some of them were quite odd.

I did wonder if that applied to some of the FS side as well:

"You''re flying back to Belfast tonight? Could you take these [QA] samples back with you?"

Solutions of explosives.

[Potty Professor]

Re: At my place of work

Reminds me of when I was an apprentice at an automotive engineering firm. We had one of our number that we dubbed "Speedy", because he was absolutely useless at anything mechanical. He passed the degree course because he had a terrific memory and could remember any and all facts that he read, but when it came to actually applying those facts, well, no. He was originally given the nickname after the Lathework course at Apprentice Training School, the three week course included four "Stage Tests" wherein you had to make increasingly complicated pieces of work. He never completed the first, a simple pin punch, and nearly killed the Milling Machine Instructor when he broke a parting off tool and the broken piece flew the length of the Training School building and embedded itself in the cork pinboard next to the instructor's head.

[Alan Brown]

Re: At my place of work

"I suspect he landed the degrees he did by being a good test taker."

As a technician, we always suspected that about engineers. Many of the ones who went from tech to engineer did so because they couldn't be trusted not to break things and as such had plenty of time to do paperwork (which they also usually managed to break)

[David Hicklin]

Re: At my place of work

> The company has layoffs every January & June. Like clockwork.

I worked at a place like that in the early 1990's that following a takeover and then sale to another asset stripper, was not a nice atmosphere especially when you knew that the ones going were the longer standing employees who had better contracts rather than the recent hires who were on far worse deals.

[DS999]

How dumb can you be?

If you're that dumb that you want to stop fan noise by cutting the fan wire, why wouldn't you want to stop hard drive noise (which was REALLY bad in the 486DX2 days) by cutting the hard drive power cable wire as well?

[Korev]

All the stuff Ewen's company made, plus a network controller, ended up in a tower PC case. "I believe the CPU was a 486 DX2 66 MHz," he said.

I remember getting a DX2, I had people coming around to see it. Doom was seriously fast on that thing...

Greybeard icon -->

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

And Descent worked very well too!

[Already?]

I remember our whole dept being furnished with 286 machines followed relatively soon afterwards by a bunch of 386 PCs as their replacements. Whispers quickly started that our boss had a 486, rumoured to be impossibly and implausibly fast. 640K of memory too.

[AustinTX]

I remember how proud I felt installing a 486 DX4 that I found prematurely scrapped in a junk shop. My god that thing booted windows 98 fast! Just a couple of minutes...

[Alan Brown]

I remember my first 486dx2-100 . It sprinted - 40 bogomips. Unheard of speed

(By way of contrast, that's about what you get in a basic 50-cent ESP32, with a 2010s era i7-4790 hitting 38,000. The 486 computer with 128MB of ram cost over $5000 before adding a pair of 4GB drives at $2000 apiece)

[myootnt]

Yeah, but did you install RH on it with floppies?

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Nah, Slackware.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the same, but ...

In the previous millennium

I've had visiting sales staff come into the office , find an empty office and :

- unplug the machine in the office so they could plug in their laptop

- switch off external harddrives ``because the noise ...''

- unplug the monitor because they wanted to see if they could use them on their laptop (they were 4BNC or whatever the ones were called with the individual connectors for each channel) and accidentally switching off the machine in the process

Less deliberate, but also

- move the external harddrives aside, so they could put their whatever on the desk, thereby accidentally unseating a scsi cable

[trindflo]

Re: Not the same, but ...

Machine left in a closed room to roast because the local manager was terrified people would do things to him if the room wasn't kept locked.

That didn't explain why there was trash everywhere, including burying the machine. I assumed that was just another charming personality trait.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: Not the same, but ...

SCSI

Reordering the external SCSI drives for "aesthetic reasons" and losing the terminator.

Basically, since as a BoFH if you cannot lock up your users, you lock away anying important and most other stuff, removing temptation from prying fingers and vacant skulls.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Not the same, but ...

>as a BoFH if you cannot lock up your users,

What kind of poor excuse for a BOFH can't find a way? /That's what the sub-aub-basement is for

[TheWeetabix]

Re: Not the same, but ...

I find removing the prying fingers and empty skulls accomplishes much the same result.

[Great Southern Land]

Re: Not the same, but ...

>>>I find removing the prying fingers and empty skulls accomplishes much the same result.

Keeping boltcutters and a baby chainsaw on your desk should prevent the problems occurring to begin with.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Not the same, but ...

I turned up to deal with one networking closet to find someone had turned it into a high powered laser test area and disabled the cooling fans because "noisy"

Guess which someone was complaining about "the Internet not working"

"It's the best possible location, no windows for anything to leak out of. We submitted paperwork to take it over."

They damned near got the equipment inserted where sun doesn't shine

The closet got a much more substantial lock and (management backed) threats of removal of all networking equipment on HSE grounds if someone pulled that stunt again

[that one in the corner]

Re: Not the same, but ...

Reading that, I had a happy daydream that a serious manager would be called in to see the state of the kit and then channel his inner Crowley (talking to the houseplants): walk the offending salesman past all of his colleagues in every sales office "say goodbye, he just couldn't cut it".

HR probably wouldn't allow these days.

[David 132]

Re: Not the same, but ...

> "say goodbye"

If we're channeling Crowley, wouldn't "Hastur la vista" be more appropriate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not the same, but ...

Or my mother during my live at home while at uni years (oppressive regressive upbringing) who decided the deliberately left clear space to the left of my laptop was the perfect space to put some random book I had elsewhere to "neaten" my room (yeah VERY glad to leave home, I think prisoners get more privacy and less blatant intrusion), sticks said book right against laptop, I come home to find the CPU fan screaming it's head off at top volume (had left it running a either a program or a very primitive 3d render, while i was at my night job)

[WSWS]

Re: Not the same, but ...

That's [I]sales[/I] though, this person was supposed to be an [I]engineer[/I].

[Someone Else]

Re: Not the same, but ...

It's exactly what you'd expect from sales/marketing types...

[Code For Broke]

Re: Not the same, but ...

And why were these essential devices left where any old sod could interfere with them?

[Stratman]

Re: Not the same, but ...

Essential or not is irrelevant, they were nothing to do with the sales droid. If I had been a manager at the operation I would have told them to get out and not to return, and explained to their boss why they are forever banned from my premises.

[doublelayer]

Re: Not the same, but ...

Who says they were essential? I don't see that in the original comment, just that messing with them eventually was a problem. Even if it was just getting called in to reconnect everything and waiting through a boot process by someone who needed them for something, that can be a problem if it happens a lot.

Also, I think IT has somehow gained a curse of people thinking that it's responsible for any action anyone performs near a computer. How did IT get the responsibility to make it impossible for people, no matter how stupid or malicious, to cause a problem? Most other departments aren't similarly castigated for that. Nobody asks the transportation staff how it was possible for their company car to be damaged when another car collided with it or why there weren't five backups ready to take over for it in the same area. Except in particularly secure facilities, building access isn't asked why it was possible for me to steal things in an environment where it's expected that I can take my own laptop home so taking other stuff involves picking it up.

[Scene it all]

Re: Not the same, but ...

I kind of liked the Good Old Days where the computers were in a locked room with a raised floor, Significant air cond, and a specialized crew of acolytes to take care of them. Luckily for me, I was one of the anointed software people who knew the combination to the door lock.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not the same, but ...

Earlier this week, a colleague of mine was hot-desking and didn't realize that a) there was a keyboard plugged into that office's docking station, and b) there was something heavy on the keyboard, coincidentally - and unfortunately - holding down the DEL key.

When my colleague plugged in his laptop, he had Outlook open. Which meant that the newly-discovered keyboard had focus and free reign on his inbox.

As emails started vanishing into the ether at a rate of knots, he frantically reached for the external keyboard...

...and knocked a cup of coffee all over the keyboard & desk.

Result, 24 hours later: the IT dept have managed to recover "most" of the email, and some of the rest of us in the team are trying hard not to snigger, whilst breathing a fervent "there but for the grace of God..." sigh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not the same, but ...

That's fucking brilliant!!!!!

[Alan Brown]

Re: Not the same, but ...

"the IT dept have managed to recover "most" of the email"

ZFS helps a lot with this kind of thing (as long as you enable the snapshotting feature)

It reduced my headache load a lot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Repair shop bodge

I'm sure I've told this one on here before. Mid 90s, had a call from a remote office in Romania saying their laptop wouldn't sit flat on the desk because it had something sticking out of the bottom.

Got them to send me a photo. The laptop processor cooling fan had stopped working and the machine was overheating. On the laptops we used (from a company in North London, AJP) the processor fan was a modular replacable part, basically a plastic grille cover plate with a very thin fan underneath that sat on the top of the processor..

Instead of letting me know so I could order a replacement fan, they took the machine into a local computer shop who fitted the lowest profile fan they had. Unfortunately this fan was much thicker than the one they were replacing, so they cut a hole in the bottom of the laptop and the fan stuck out about 1cm, well above the 2-3mm rubber feet..

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Repair shop bodge

So you cut a hole in the desk!

[MrReynolds2U]

Re: Repair shop bodge

No, you cut a hole in your lap.

[cd]

Re: Repair shop bodge

To match the hole in the head...

[Hawkuletz]

Re: Repair shop bodge

This seems absolutely legit. I started working in the late 90s there (in a local computer shop as it were, although probably a different one). The craziest job that I saw attempted "back in the day" was trying to replace the CCFL backlight assembly (on a monochrome LCD) with a "handmade" string of LEDs with a separate power supply. The brightness left something to be desired.

In all fairness, there was a huge incentive for bodges, as original parts were extremely difficult to come by (and importing one was basically unheard of). Consider also the fact that a monthly salary of around 200$ a month was considered good back then (meaning that even a desktop computer would be a bit of an investment). All of this contributed to a mindset that would absolutely have done that bodge and be proud of it.

To be clear, I'm not endorsing that, I'm just explaining the circumstances. Things changed of course, starting in the early noughties.

[CountCadaver]

Re: Repair shop bodge

Only failure of the shop was failing to glue on longer feet (or worse wood screw them on)

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: Repair shop bodge

Customer bodge - Fitted a HP CD Burner with 1" wood screws & wondered why it wouldn't work or why it wasn't covered under warranty.

[jake]

Re: Repair shop bodge

I watched a guy drive a deck screw (3 1/4 inch, Robertson drive) into a brand new running laptop because "the CD drawer kept popping open, so I was screwing it shut". Well, to be honest he only drove the screw part way in ... he jumped about three feet straight up when he finally made electrical contact & let the magic smoke out.

Why didn't I stop him? Because there was a closed window, an unfinished deck, and about a dozen feet of driveway between us. We didn't even know what he had done until we rushed outside ... we thought he had managed to get bit by a rattler or something, the way he was carrying on ... A quick diagnosis showed that he was resting his hands in such a way that his finger was brushing the eject button. Oops.

After being asked, I told him that I was quite sorry, but no, I didn't think the warranty would cover the damage. I found out later that he contrived an "accident" involving his flunky driving off in the truck with the laptop still plugged into the worksite genset, thus slamming it into the ground while running. His company insurance covered it. There ain't no justice.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Repair shop bodge

Cases like that make me tempted to contact the insurer in question and suggest their loss adjuster inspect the device more closely

Insurance fraud is why most of us can't have nice things

[DailyLlama]

Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

When screensavers with sounds were all the rage, the girl who sat behind me used to have the Haunted House theme. Her job meant that she'd have to leave her desk fairly frequently to process customer orders etc, so the screensaver would turn on a lot. And make all sorts of screaming and creaking noises, which was pretty annoying. So I disabled it. And she re-enabled it. So I uninstalled it. My colleague (unknown to me at the time) helped her to reinstall it. Then one glorious day, while I was covering their lunch breaks, I finally had enough, and took the speaker out of her computer. Problem solved forever!

[jake]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

"When screensavers with sounds were all the rage"

That would have been (roughly) the last week of October, 1991.

[MiguelC]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

My screen saver annoyed people without making a sound.

I loved the maze one. My coworkers, not so much.... I copied the building's depressing style: dark blue flooring, green ceilings and brick walls. "Dispiriting Doom", I used to call it.

Every single day when I got back from lunch break my screen was turned off

[pirxhh]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

When we moved office, we got those newfangled 3D plans from the architects. Of course, someone had to make a Doom level from it, and (very crudely, using MS Paint, I think) photoshop coworkers' faces onto the monsters. Lunch break entertainment was... different. Great fun was had by all.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

Copy it to your new windows, and it still works. Same for some of the Windows95 "plus!" screensavers, like the Lens-Black-hole thingy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

> "Every single day when I got back from lunch break my screen was turned off"

Most effective screen saver ever!

[Alan Brown]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

The best I ever saw was the scrolling text one saying "The System has crashed and all data is lost!"

It raised blood pressure almost instantly in a lot of people. Frequently that blood pressure went even higher when they realised they'd been fooled.

[Lexi Ryedale]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

Replacing the offending screensaver with the sysinternals BSOD screensaver was a favourite of mine in the latter years of that era.

The look on the user's face when they saw the crashdump-reboot loop and thought all their (usually unsaved) work had gone byebye never tired.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

I remember running a Linux kernel build in a full screen xterm, and having a cow-orker come by and ask why I was staring at a screensaver.

[The other JJ]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

Followed by power cycling the machine and really losing all their (usually unsaved) work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

I liked to edit one of the .SYS files so that the BSOD was no longer blue. I could then claim that I never saw the blue screen of death on my computer, as it was green instead.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

"took the speaker out of her computer"

The more subtle one is to find a way to short out the speaker. If it's connected by some sort of twin cable a pin does nicely - just clip it to length so nothing obvious shows.

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

A story I was told back in mainframe days (I'm pretty sure I heard it in 1979). Whether true or legend, I have no idea...

It seems an IBM mainframe went on the fritz. The field engineer couldn't figure it out, and neither could the second-level guys, so third-level support was called onto site. Finally, after much Sturm und Drang und $$$, and I don't recall how many levels of escalation[1] or how many swaps of large, expensive boxes, the problem was found: A disgruntled employee becoming ex-, had jammed a long pin through one of the fat, many-conductor data cables running under the raised floor, then broken it off in such a way that, while the internal damage was extensive, the injury to the outer cable sheath was all but invisible. A very effective form of sabotage, and devilishly hard to pin down.

[1] Surprising trivia: the verb "escalate" is back-formed from "Escalator", which in turn was coined as an Otis brand name. A quick look suggests that the lawsuit in which they lost exclusive rights to it was a landmark genericized-trademark case.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

> I finally had enough, and took the speaker out of her computer

In the dim and distant past I had pretensions of being a mainframe programmer. Which, for the majority of the time was *utterly* boring. So, I managed to wangle an additional RAM card for my PS/2 50z and 'obtained' a copy of Desqview/X

Which meant I could run something like the Ultima games (or the D&D games - this was the early 1990s) at the same time as running the 3270 terminal emulator in the background. And configure a quick-key that would swap instantly back to the terminal emulator if I saw my boss coming.

Trouble is that there were startup sounds that couldn't be turned off and I didn't really want to deface my work PC. So, I managed to find a nice fresh rubber (oi! - you leftpondian, stop sniggering!) of the right size and cut it down into the approximate shape of the front of the PC speaker. I wrapped it in tissue and wedged it in place between the speaker and the front of the case. Hey presto, no more noises!

When I left that job I think I took the evidence with me - it's probably in a box upstairs somewhere with my IBM POPS manual..

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

Shirley replacing the sound files with something a bit less appropriate for an office would have been more effective/funny.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

But that's not important right now, and don't call me Shirley.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

My best prank was to put for all actions on a colleague device military music from the Napoleonic era.

Since he was a huge fan of the wargames of that period, he was laughing at first, then spent more than 40 minutes accessing the configuration panel for reverting the sounds back to the standard ones, waiting after each action for a tune to play to its full length before being allowed to proceed to the next step...

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

And of course you did not help him be exporting the registry from one machine and import it into his? Indeed Mr. Evil !

[jake]

Well, he tried to vandalize it ...

... but he wasn't an engineer. He was the owner.

The guy spent quite a bit of money on a new computer for his company, and an office management software package to go with it. The staff took a three day training course to learn how to use it, with three folks from the software company coming in over a three day weekend. The Boss "couldn't make it", and missed the class.

The following weekend, I got a panicked call from the Boss. Seems he had come in to acquaint himself with the new equipment, discovered he didn't even know how to log in to the system, and so decided it was broken and threw a Windows CD into the drive and fired it up to fix it. And got nothing but error messages.

Good thing. The new box was an IBM RT running AIX ... If it had been a Windows-on-Intel machine, he'd have destroyed the entire corporate database.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Well, he tried to vandalize it ...

OTOH, that AIX box would've destroyed the entire corporate database all by itself.

[jake]

Re: Well, he tried to vandalize it ...

Nah. AIX was a good OS for it's era. Still is, actually, if you need that kind of thing.

[Someone Else]

Hey Simon, knock it off!

This On Call episode opens with:

Every week is special in its own way, and The Register celebrates that fact by using Friday mornings to deliver a fresh installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column that shares your memories of managing IT messes someone else made.

I resent the implication that I had anything to do with the cockups you so gleefully present in this, or any other, On Callcolumn!

_{But do keep up the good work...}

[Bill Gray]

Chesterton's fence

G. K. Chesterton wrote something that boils down to : if you see a fence running across a road, you shouldn't tear it down until you figure out why it was put there. Somebody presumably went to the time, trouble, and expense of erecting the fence, and had some reason for doing it.

You may eventually learn that their reason no longer applies, or just doesn't matter as much as it used to, and then you might pull the fence down on a suitably informed basis. But you shouldn't equate "I don't see why that's there" with "there's no good reason for that to be there".

As I recall, he was mostly thinking in terms of politics. The idea is that each generation comes along and assumes its parents were idiots, and that society should be rebuilt on more sensible, modern principles... usually without first considering why the parents did such idiotic things. But it's a good engineering principle as well.

[ttlanhil]

Re: Chesterton's fence

> The idea is that each generation comes along and assumes its parents were idiots, and that society should be rebuilt on more sensible, modern principles... usually without first considering why the parents did such idiotic things

Sometimes the previous generation really were stupid (or had moments of stupidity)... But never forget that your generation, and the one after it, will also be stupid!

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: Chesterton's fence

"Sometimes the previous generation really were stupid (or had moments of stupidity)."

Exactly. It's the assumption -- and acting on that assumption without looking into it --that's the problem.

I could embark on a long, political rant here, but I'm enjoying my weekend too much...

[Alan Brown]

Re: Chesterton's fence

When it comes to politics, the biggest problem is that when a minor issue pops up there's a mentality of we must do SOMETHING.

Often the best thing to do is nothing whatsoever and the SOMETHING merely exacerbates the issue, turning it from minor to major

[Terry 6]

Re: Chesterton's fence

The old gag.

A tourist on a walking trip goes into a pub on his route. He gets chatting withthe landlord about his trip, and mentions the cliff up from the pub.

"That's a hell of a sudden drop. I'm surprised there's no warning sign"

"Oh there was sir. But no one over fell off so we took it away"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Chesterton's fence

if you see a fence running, call the police!

[Alan Brown]

Re: Chesterton's fence

In a lot of cases, I BUILT that fence, know exactly what it was for, put it in as a temporary workaround, have determined it's no longer needed - and then get blocked by management from removing that fence, which is now an impediment to doing things correctly "Because we've always done things this way"

[WSWS]

And this person was supposed to be an [I]engineer[/I]. I just can't.

[Marty McFly]

College roommate hacking

Back in the 33.6k dial up days, DOS & Windows 3.1... I helped a buddy deal with an annoying roommate.

Roommate liked to get on-line and troll the Internet. This was pre-web days when many sites were wide open to Telnet & FTP with u:anonymous p:<your email address>. Roommate would stay up all hours of the night, so we installed a 'line noise generator' which would kill the phone connection - essentially crossed the ring & tip wires, and the modem shrugged and gave up.

For a while we spoofed the roommate by pointing a blue LED keyring light at his monitor and claimed it generated line noise. He believed it.

Not to be deterred by random disconnections, the roommate took up VGA graphics first player shooter games. Again staying up all night. Roommate had work-study all day on the weekend and was absent for a predicted period of time. Remember how POTS has four wires, just in case you want to add a second phone line? The yellow & black wires coming in to the internal modem on the desktop PC "somehow" got wired in to the reset switch. Elsewhere in the dorm room a momentary contact switch was connected to the yellow & black.wires. And presto, a remote reboot switch!

He never did figure out why his machine would randomly crap out after midnight.

Cheers to innocent days with under challenged creative minds!

[Gavsky]

Re: College roommate hacking

Excellent work there; it's always immensely satisfying when you have to put some effort into revenge/'random' reboots....

[I could be a dog really]

Re: College roommate hacking

Reminds me of the days when Macs had a 9 pin D connector for the (very dumb) mouse - just fed the X,Y, and button signals into the Mac where they got processed. There was also a game (Crystal Quest which needed a lot of mouse clicks - which was good for us later on when, in our dealership, I did a little line in replacing mouse switches for people that didn't fancy paying something like £75 (1990s money) for new ones. Anyway, I knocked up a little circuit that when switched on would generate a rapid stream of mouse clicks when you held the button down - really good for zapping the Dumples !

But at the time, I worked in an engineering business, and at the desk back-back with mine was a Mac because one of our system suppliers was developing with them and we needed it to read their documentation. Of course, I didn't slip my rapid fire module in, and hide the cable under some stray sheets of paper ... It took weeks for them to find it, and I had to pinky swear to my manager I'd take it straight home before he'd give it me back.

[Gavsky]

"So I opened the case and cut the wires" would have been the last thing he EVER said, if I was there to 'fix it'. I'd have beaten him to death with the system, then thrown the components all over the place, before standing on his corpse & ripping my shirt asunder, whilst screaming into the void "Waaannnkkkeeerrr!"....

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to deal with video frame buffer cards for animation systems years ago. If they started getting a bit warm, they would lose colour and display black and white.

A good way to find out if the PSU fan is in the wrong way round!!

[CA_Diver]

Heat Sinking

I had a customer running a PDP, with associated heat generating disk storage. They turned off building air conditioning for the weekend. This was in Tucson, Arizona. Why are there so many hardware failures? Your system is unreliable. . . A paper temperature thermostat was our shot back.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Heat Sinking

"A paper temperature thermostat "

Chart recorder?

Factory control room near Naples> There was a chart recorder at the top of a rack. By normal English standards nobody was tall but for some reason the shortest of them had the job of jumping up and down to read it.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Heat Sinking

> the shortest of them had the job of jumping up and down to read it

Jumping? Sure that was not an IQ test?

[I could be a dog really]

Re: Heat Sinking

I'd assumed on of those tell-tale sticker types that records the highest temperature it's been subjected to.

But my favourite is people who want you to put the noisy server in some convenient (for them) cupboard - such as under the stairs. "It's nice and cool" they'd say, and I then had to explain that it was only cool because it didn't have a fan heater in there with zero airflow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Amstrad 1512

The Amstrad 1512 PC had no fan and this was blamed by some for it being crash-prone. Alan Sugar (this was pre Lord or even Sir days) was adamant no fan was needed but eventually gave in and a fan was added - however he said

“I’m a realistic person and we are a marketing organization, so if it’s the difference between people buying the machine or not, I’ll stick a bloody fan in it. And if they want bright pink spots on it I’ll do that too. What is the use of me banging my head against a brick wall and saying ‘You don’t need the damn fan, sunshine’?

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Amstrad 1512

"we are a marketing organization"

That explained a lot. I always looked at Amstrad kit as having just enough components to look like a product but just not enough to actually be a product, or at least not one I'd want to buy.

[Paul Hovnanian]

Just remind the customer ...

... of your shop rates.

[Snapper]

Had a client in a cramped office with a 19-Inch cabinet with several servers and RAID units. I'd installed a fan rack (cheapest one the MD would approve) but the client kept complaining about the servers switching off due to heat.

I was stumped but turned up early for my meeting the next day and when I walked in to the studio I couldn't hear the cooling fans. Had a chat with the friendly new receptionist who told me the fans were always off as no-one liked the noise, but if anyone was visiting they were switched back on.

[Alan Brown]

This is why I always install fan and temperature monitoring kit in areas where people can interfere with the kit.

It's also why fire marshalls periodically conduct surprise inspections - especially after being forwarded internal mails which say "fire inspection tomorrow, please ensure all fire doors are CLOSED and passageways clear"

[J.G.Harston]

"I believe the CPU was a 486 DX2 66 MHz,"

That would be a 66 MHz 486 DX2. Adjectives go before nouns in English.