Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

WHO, ME? The world of work is basically broken, which is why The Register uses Monday mornings to remind readers of that foul fact in a new instalment of “Who, Me?” – the reader-contributed column that shares your mistakes and reveals how you recovered from them. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Hank” who told us his …

[Korev]

Sounds like a bit of a hanker to me...

[stiine]

That's one mistake I've not made yet. but... I have carried a DS5 switch chassis across campus under my arm, only to be told afterwards that the box was worth more than I made in a year...

[John Robson]

Drove a serious storage server home nearly twenty years ago, was taking it for EMC testing the next day.

Spent a chunk of the journey realising that it cost substantially more than my car, and then the sheer bandwidth of carrying 24 massive 2TB disks home.

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

Had to drive a Novell 4.1 server ( as featured in the story!) back to the main site once because it didnt seem to be able to connect properly over the link ( even though remote site seemed connected in other repects) and if it didnt talk to the main servers at base within 48 hrs it was going to have some sort of major psychological breakdown - so it had to be taxied home .

[Anonymous Coward]

2TB? 20 years ago?

You could have been daily driving top-of-the-line Rolls Royce and still have them be worth more!

[John Robson]

Not quite... but very close to it.

The disks were basically the largest available at the time.

Servers were stacked: opteron dual core, dual socket, machines with IIRC just shy of 10GHz combined clock speed and a crapload of ram for the time.

No doubt today it would have been an EPYC based machine with insane amounts of spinning rust storage, and a couple of SSDs for boot drives.

[David Robinson 1]

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

[ICL1900-G3]

Top quote from a top book by a top man!

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

Wait ... so is the "top man" David Robinson 1 or Andrew S. Tanenbaum ?

The English grammar system seems to be ambiguous here

[Yes Me]

Grammar clarification

Definitely Andy. But... he didn't think of that himself, he picked it up on one of his many visits to CERN, at a time when a lot of data was distributed that way, or in Swissair Jumbo jets for US universities. I'm sure somebody worked out the theoretical bandwidth of a 747 between GVA and JFK.

[bemusedHorseman]

It's the latency that'll kill your project, though.

[andy the pessimist]

A field service engineer had fixed the ATE and had 3 RF frequency synthesisers to return to base for repair.

They cost 100k$ each. Much more expensive than his car.

[Gerhard den Hollander]

For years I've driven stuff around in the back of my car that was worth more than my car ...

I've had bikes in the back of my car that were worth more then my car ...

Then again, that was mainly because the car was 20+ years old and had a resale value in the low triple digits

[xyz123]

Do you consider your wife/kids/grandma etc to be worth more than the car? :)

[Anonymous Coward]

it helps having a car worth less than a good meal at a mid price restaurant.

[Richard Pennington 1]

Technical write-off

I had a car which was a technical write-off every time it needed a fill-up with petrol ...

[Robert Carnegie]

This could be the wrong solution but you might want only to have one of those expensive devices being carried in your car at one time. Like members of the Government or the Royal Family, if not for exactly the same reasons.

And they still have to make the journey, and all to the same place - and with you driving. And if something happens to the car - you'll be worried about yourself first, and the expensive electronic passenger or passengers, as a second thought.

I suppose that one driver and four footwells adds up to three reasonably safe places to put your passengers...

[NetMage]

I took a switch chassis card for our network core across the street to our MDF under my arm in its antistatic bag one time. It was worth over three months salary.

[l8gravely]

I was once rolling a full cabinet stuffed with 7 Sun V240s each with 2Gb of RAM, 4 x CPUs, etc. Was worth more than my _house_ at the time....

[collinsl]

Thanks to the rising cost of disk pricing and multi-year support contracts etc, the other week I was walking up the stairs in our office with a small box of disks worth almost double the average UK house price.

[Giles C]

You get immune to the value of parts

After a while you don’t notice how much things cost, this afternoon I just moved about £50k of network switches between two buildings on a flat bed trolley, there is a stack in the build room, containing a 9410, two 9500x28c8, a couple of console servers, some more switches and various cables. Any of this bolted ins rack nope just resting on top of each other because that is full of £400k firewalls that need to be installed and a few test bits of kit.

If we stopped to think how much some of this is worth we would be scared of working on it.

[David Hicklin]

Bank in the 1990's as the sole IT person I took 3 Netware 2.xx servers one by one to a new site , and then a few years later brought them all back again as we relocated back to where we had come from! Not everyone was moving at once, so the network was "split" and then reconnected later. Amazed we did not have password/access sync issues.

Then once we were back the new owners took over 2 other smaller companies who were relocated to our site , and had the joys of driving across the country to collect their servers and drive them back. They were a collect late Friday and they had to be ready & working first thing Monday job

Fun days, I never managed to break anything thankfully.

[sin]

Well, if memory serves me good enough, Netware 2.x (and even 3.x) did not have a central user database, so you could do anything you want with multiple servers, they were only synchronized if you did that manually.

Now, Netware 4 came with NDS (Novel/Netware Directory Services) and made SSO possible.

Not much after, Microsoft introduced AD as a pretty blatant copy of NDS.

Call me old :)

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

This somehow reminds me of various exploits of the BOFH about the Way of the Hammer.

[simonlb]

Sticky Bits

I once unpacked a brand new 170Mb hard drive and when I powered it on it span up but the heads never moved (no noises from the actuator at all): Tried it three times with the same result and the PC reporting a HDD failure. Took the drive out, left the power cable connected and stood the drive on it's side then powered it up. Lifted the front of the drive up about two inches then slammed it back down on the desk and the actuator then made all it's usual noises. Reconnected the data cable and was able to format the drive and it worked as normal.

Have also come across stuck actuators on the 20/30Mb hard cards you used to get in things like Amstrad 1512 PC's where it would report a drive failure. You'd have to open the case, take the dust cap off the side of the drive actuator and turn the actuator spindle with your fingers to free the heads and get the drive working again.

[DJV]

Re: Sticky Bits

I had something similar way back in the previous century. I had an Amiga 2000 around 1990-ish and splashed out some serious money on a Quantum 80MB hard disk and associated plug-in card. It worked fine for about 3 years, but then developed the habit of failing to start up in the morning. My solution was to pull card plus drive out of the slot, shake it around a bit, slam it back in and it would then power up for another day's work. It got replaced after that with a much cheaper and "massive" 540MB drive until I had to reluctantly retire the Amiga as they went out of fashion.

[ChrisC]

Re: Sticky Bits

"I had to reluctantly retire the Amiga as they went out of fashion"

They may have gone into hibernation for a bit, but they've never really gone out of fashion, at least not with those of us who were either big Amiga users back in the day, or who now want to experience what a well designed retro system is like...

Whilst this now sounds more like an urban legend rather than a true story, back in those days I recall talk that some Amigas would be DOA because their socketed custom chips had been shaken slightly loose due to speed bumps on the road leading away from the Westchester loading dock, and the fix was to turn them upside down and drop them, to encourage the chips back into place.

[DJV]

Re: fix was to turn them upside down and drop them

I had to do that on my original Amiga 500 but it definitely was not "upside down" as the chips would have fallen clean out of the sockets! Dropping them had to be done with the computer the right way up down onto a bed or something else softish that wouldn't have caused any further damage.

[ChrisC]

Re: fix was to turn them upside down and drop them

Thanks for the first hand experience clarification - I couldn't quickly find any references to it online, and it's been so long since I last heard the story, I honestly wasn't even sure if my memory was just playing tricks on me and it was nothing more than something I'd imagined...

[hugo tyson]

Stiction [was Re: Sticky Bits]

Twas ever thus, head actuators of HDDs and floppies, and also HDD spindles. Best never to turn them off.

Re damaging expensive kit: I once knocked a coffee into the top of a logic analyser, face-up on the floor, which cost the same as my house. In 1984 both were a lot of money, about 3x annual pay.. The analyser was made of tough stuff too thank goodness.

[Aladdin Sane]

Re: Stiction [was Sticky Bits]

A house 3x annual pay? Luxury

[StewartWhite]

Re: Stiction [was Sticky Bits]

... and you tell that to children today and they won't believe you!

[KittenHuffer]

Re: Stiction [was Sticky Bits]

Move to South Wales then. I could still buy a 2 bed terraced house here for 3 times my annual salary!

[Vincent Manis]

Re: Stiction [was Sticky Bits]

Back when I was a callow teen, not old enough to drive, I found myself operating an IBM 7044 mainframe system, which filled a massive computer room. It had a massive hard drive, an IBM 1301, which held 30 6-bit megabytes. I was allowed to shut the computer down at the end of my shift, but told NEVER to shut the 1301 down, as starting it up and getting the disks up to speed required most of a day. I never dared to find out whether that was true.

[Yes Me]

Re: Stiction [was Sticky Bits]

You wouldn't have wanted to pay for it out of your pocket money. Wikipedia says "The IBM 1301 Model 1 leased for $2,100 per month or could be purchased for $115,500. Prices for the Model 2 were $3,500 per month or $185,000 to purchase. The IBM 7631 controller cost an additional $1,185 per month or $56,000 to purchase. " And those were 1960's prices.

[werdsmith]

Re: Stiction [was Sticky Bits]

Hard drives being big chunky things back in the day we had CPM, I was told to always run the head parking tool to safely stow the head before moving the equipment. Sometime I would forget and spend a good few minutes of worrying if the thing would boot up again. It always did. I suspect the procedure was lagacy and the HDDs were auto-parking by then.

[Robert Carnegie]

Re: Stiction [was Sticky Bits]

Hmm, it depends how long you kept using... CP/M? I have a rough sense that auto-parking hard disks appeared later than the 1980s, for consumer or office electronics anyway?

Or you were lucky - if any data was erased or disk damaged, it was somewhere that you didn't notice it?

[David Hicklin]

Re: Stiction [was Sticky Bits]

> op of a logic analyser, face-up on the floor, which cost the same as my house

Yeah stuff like that was really expensive in the 1980's, first place I worked for had a spectrum analyser in the electronics lab that they has to purchase in two parts due to purchasing limits.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sticky Bits

i had an IBM 200MB scsi back in the early 90s... it wouldn;t work in a standard hard drive caddy. it needed to be hung from the sides, which provided just enough twist to keep the heads free.

and for whatever reason- the first sector had a bad patch that the drive scanner wouldn;t mark as bad, and every now and again it would corrupt and need to be rewritten.

[DR_EVIL30564]

Re: Sticky Bits

I used to have to do percussive maintenance on the old 5.25 inch quantum bigfoot drives. After they were in use for a few years the lubricant in the spindle bearings would dry out. the spindle bearing would freeze up rending the platters being unable to spin. We had a batch of about 100 Compaq desktop systems that came with the bigfoot drives as the standard configuration.

We were replacing the drives as they failed with regular 3.5" drives, but in order to be able to retrieve data off of them, I'd have to take a plastic handle screw driver and tap the center of the drive on top of the spindle then give the entire drive a twist with my wrist to force the spindle to break free so it would work again until it was powered off and cooled off.

I'm glad they quit making those bigfoot drives, they were not a very good design.

[Andy A]

Re: Sticky Bits

In the early Apricot hard drive models, the disks were made by Rodime in Scotland. On cool mornings they would refuse to spin up. It turned out that condensation forming between the platters and the heads had enough surface tension to stall the motor. The OFFICIAL fix was to thump the side of the box with the heel of your hand. The heads jumped into the air and all was well again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sticky Bits

I would use the heel on my foot - that's how ya boot up computers!

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Sticky Bits

> turn the actuator spindle

I LITERALLY had the same with an Olivetti MS-DOS 2.11 PC. When it was off for more than a week I had to push the stepper motor to unstuck the heads and make the drive spin up. That was a 3.5 inch card drive too, ~1 inch high. It even had the arm holing the heads rectangular to the drive, not like the spinning arm newer drives used.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Not with a disk, but

I remember a friend who put a new 128Mb EPROM (in the days when such things were rare and very expensive) into the PROM programmer backwards. It didn't survive.

He kept it stuck to the wall beside him in 'dead insect ' pose, to remind him not to do it again.

[Mast1]

Re: Not with a disk, but

I did that (briefly) with a 256kB UVEPROM, which then performed an electric-purple glow through the window, and rapid diagnosis of something amiss. Looked a bit like the colour of the eraser lamp.

The strange thing was that it still worked afterwards.

With the early power N-MOSFETS (TO3 can), I managed to destroy as much over several episodes in one week as my gross pay. But then the lab head destroyed more in one instance than my week's pay. It was a very temperamental circuit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not with a disk, but

While fixing a receiver fault in a military radar set, I picked up a component which was being worked on and asked what it was. The sergeant in charge quickly quipped "It was an expensive diode but it is now a piece of sand since you've touched both ends". Fortunately it was the part being replaced and the set worked flawlessly after the work.

[jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid]

Re: Not with a disk, but

Nothing broke here either, but when I was at university, my tutor had a fine piece of certain metal that he had swiped from the specialist engineering workshops and was using it as a paperweight. Just looking up prices of said metal, I'm guessing today it would be worth about £80,000.

[NorthIowan]

Re: Not with a disk, but

I'm our Church's main IT person. We had a new PC coming in the mail when the old desktop died and would not turn on. I tried a few things, like a new power cord, but nothing worked.

New laptop came the next day. So I took in my laptop and my USB to IDE/SATA drive adapter so I could recover the data. For jollies, I plugged the old PC back in and tried to turned it on. And it did turn on! That made the data transfer to the new laptop much easier.

It turned out that the power supply would only work if it was unplugged long enough, and overnight was long enough.

[Dinanziame]

Re: Not with a disk, but

Then it was a quick one! For a church, I'd have expected it to only come back after three days...

[David Hicklin]

Re: Not with a disk, but

> With the early power N-MOSFETS

Did the same as an apprentice in the dev lab, was putting together a 5v switched mode power supply and had a bank of resistors as a test load. one day I decided to add more load and all was good until suddenly the output voltage started dropping followed by molten globs of semiconductor flying out the MOSFETS. turned out they had a thermal characteristic that caused them to run-away and as they got hotter it got worse until POOF!

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Not with a disk, but

Sure they were MOSFETs? Junction transistors suffer from thermal runaway, but one of the nice things about MOSFETs is that they usually don't. You can parallel a bunch of them to get higher output power, and thy automagically spread the load without need for other components. If one takes more than the others it warms up, the resistance increases, and the excess load moves to the others, levelling across them all. Try that with, say a 2N3055 and POP!

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Was testing a bunch of newly released P4 processors and soon got bored fighting with the heatsink clips, so for the next one I simply held the heatsink in place, with predictable results; a very expensive CPU self-immolated in a matter of seconds.

I used the heatsink clips for the rest of the batch...

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

"Well, boss, I finished testing the batch. I found a single broken one..."

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Must have been an early P4! Later version of Intel Pentium 4 had thermal protection to instant-off fast enough before the CPU died. Tested often enough by trainees who asked why it goes off. Just a quick glance was enough to see the heat sink not mounted right, or the foil on the base...

[Lazlo Woodbine]

They were the first gen, I was part of a team evaluating them for a new PC line...

[Gene Cash]

AMD clips

Decades ago, I had a 2nd-hand AMD board, running without a case on a bare piece of plywood, as I was a poor college student.

I was reading email when I heard "SPROOING" and something ricocheted around the walls. I was like "what the HELL was THAT?" when the box went into thermal shutdown.

Inspection showed the anchor at one end of the heatsink clip had simply pulled out of the motherboard.

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Re: AMD clips

I forget which P4 generation it was, but one model had a heatsink that was so big, it would often rip itself off the motherboard if the box was shipped upside down...

[wolfetone]

We were all Hank at one point.

Some of us still are.

[Aladdin Sane]

Underpaid and overworked without adult supervision? Can confirm.

[GM1491]

i486

I once had an i486 on my testbed. "The first in town!" - according to my boss. Worth a lot more than 3 months of my salary. Not counting the equally expensive board.

I connected everything and nothing worked....

My boss cam in, panicked and swichtched of the testbed.

The CPU was inserted incorecctly (no pins to prevent that at this point in history)

We corrected that and the CPU ran. What a tough beast it was. :-D

[PRR]

Re: i486

You can put a V-20 in backward and live.

[blu3b3rry]

Probably told this one before

....but a former factory job was working with medical implants. The production process hadn't really changed since the dev scientists had come up with it, so no automation and several stages in the process that effectively required the wind to be blowing in the right direction outside for it to work without a hitch.

The joke was that our yield was influenced by moon phase and atmospheric pressure.

We built batches of 100, and at QC stage two batches were loaded into a QC setup, so 200 per QC run. The components were in "baths" of saline inside a lab incubator with a PCB mounted underneath to handle the comms with the implants. The baths were fitted with a communal drain line that used a very cheap plastic valve worth about 50p on a good day that didn't offer much reassurance as to whether it was closed fully or not.

I did a saline change and failed to notice I hadn't closed the drain valve properly before leaving for the day on its overnight test. Each component had a value of ~£1000, and the whole lot got "baked" by the incubator overnight to the extent they didn't function when we checked the next morning. At that point I had done almost 5 years in this place and had effectively stopped caring, as we were all overworked cogs with a total dick of a manager to deal with.

I think I worked it out to writing off the equivalent of 8 years worth of pay.

A week later a pipe burst, flooding the cleanroom and writing off ~£10 million worth of stock!

[lglethal]

Re: Probably told this one before

Oh boy, have i had that sort of argument before! Why do we need all this expensive test equipment, it's only a test, surely this cheaper version would be fine?

To which the answer is Yes it would be fine. Right up until it fails, and 10's of millions of euros worth of hardware becomes an oversize paperweight.

I was once asked to create a risk analysis on the likelihood of such a failure, at which point I simply pointed out that, yes I could do that, but I would still be requiring their signature on a statement saying they take all responsibility if said failure occurs. Naturally, they refused and the discussion unsurprisingly went away.

Choosing which risks your willing to take and which not, is less a science and more a smacking your head against the brick wall that is tightwads and beancounters...

[Sam not the Viking]

Re: Probably told this one before

"Look boss, we need a modern power analyser to replace these masterpieces of Edwardian delicacy."

"How much cost?"

"£27 k."

"Oh. ..... OK."

A week later, the Financial Controller: "What the **** is this ******* multimeter?" Technically literate , they were not. There was no point in trying to explain to the boss or the accountants, but the boss had faith....... It was so useful it paid for itself within a few months.

[I could be a dog really]

Re: Probably told this one before

You're lucky the beancounter didn't just change the order to something cheaper - but probably of no use. IIRC that was the subject of a comment in these 'ere forums not long ago.

[blu3b3rry]

Re: Probably told this one before

Valves were specified by the US based client that supplied all the kit. Requests to productionise the setup with better locking valves, less bulky drain hoses or indeed anything at all that would streamline the process was always met with wailing and gnashing of teeth about "product compatibility". This extended to them specifying 110v incubators instead of 230V ones that we had to get shipped from the USA rather than the local distributor.

I think "Penny-wise and Pound-foolish" was the term our department director used to describe the person who made those decisions. That and "tosser".

[An_Old_Dog]

"Shipping Damage"

To prevent fraudulent claims of "shipping damage", we have shock/tilt sensors we affix to the shipping crate.

If the one on the outside of the crate shows red, the recipient should note this on the manifest, and refuse delivery. At that point, liability is on the shippers.

If the one on the inside of the sealed crate is still clear when our agent breaks the seals and inspects the crate, and the one on the outside of the crate is red, or "missing", we know it's due to customer shennanigans, and liability is on them.

[Sam not the Viking]

Re: "Shipping Damage"

We received a motor with the shaft-end sticking out of the side of the packing case. This motor weighed in excess of a tonne.

"That's how they pack them" said the driver.

Well, we laughed, but it transpired that the manufacturer had a new chap working in Despatch and he thought he could save the company money by using a smaller case.

[RMclan]

Re: "Shipping Damage"

We have quad ply cardboard boxes (12mm thick walls with 4 flat sheets and 3 layers of corrugation) we use for shipping worldwide. The boxes are 167cm long, 85cm wide and 90cm high when strapped to a pallet.

We sent a shipment to a customer in France last year and before it got half way the carrier decided they were returning it to us.

I still have no idea what happened to the box but when it left us it was 167cm long and when it was returned it was only 142cm long and one end was totally crushed in. It looked like someone had somehow lifted it up, rotated it by 90 degrees and then dropped it on its end.

A pair of layshafts packed at the crushed end of the box had been pushed through the walls of the internal boxes they were packed in, then through another internal box wall, a layer of bubblewrap and finally into a pair of 5L plastic bottles of hydrolastic fluid which had been at the opposite end of the box. The hydrolastic fluid had then leaked into the rest of the box prompting the carrier to return it to us.

[PRR]

Re: "Shipping Damage"

> no idea what happened

Kicked/slid off the truck. Gives a 90deg rotation and crushed end. A friend worked for a shipping company.

[RMclan]

Re: "Shipping Damage"

> Kicked/slid off the truck. Gives a 90deg rotation and crushed end. A friend worked for a shipping company.

You would think they'd be a bit more careful with a box that size and weighing nearly 350kg, it could quite easily kill someone if it fell off a truck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Shipping Damage"

Logisitcs staff found two soaking wet cardboard boxes behind the fence on a Monday morning.

The electronics inside had various signs of distress, shock-indicators for 25 and 50G triggered.

Review of the surveilance cameras showed some guy beyond caring driving up in the rain, lobbing the two packages over the fence and driving off.

From what I was told by purchasing, the shipping company claimed *we* had drenched the packages before playing forklift-football.

[H in The Hague]

Re: "Shipping Damage"

" lobbing the two packages over the fence"

Well, a few years ago, in a small town in Germany, I passed a gate with the note "If we're not here, chuck the deliveries over the gate." But that was a tyre fitter's yard :)

[Tim 11]

In the late 90's I once had to fit a £3000 video capture card to my PC

I selected "shut down" from the windows start menu then proceeded to open up the case and poke around with the screwdriver to install the card

When I returned to the front of the PC I saw the message "it is now safe to turn off your computer". The PC had a pre-atx motherboard so the power had been on the whole time.

Fortunately everything worked OK

[Antron Argaiv]

Been there, inserted new DRAM stick while simultaneously failing to note the little green LED still glowing. Impressive sparkage, resulting in e-waste m-board and DRAM.

The best learned lessons are the expensive ones, as this was one of my personal systems.

[NetMage]

Had a coworker installing a PC (to run our s/w) at a customer site and had to remove a card. He chose to replace the slot cover live and when it slipped out of his fingers, it fell over and shorted the motherboard.

[Dinanziame]

Poking around with a screwdriver, without even unplugging the power cord?

[David Hicklin]

> Poking around with a screwdriver, without even unplugging the power cord?

I built a sound to light box from a magazine design in the 1980's, it came in kit form with discrete TTL logic chips but it worked fine except that if you increased the output level on one channel, one adjacent one would come on partway, and as you increased the level it would eventually go off - despite its control being zeroed.

Poking around with a scope using an uninsulated screwdriver as a probe I touched one of the triac heat-sinks that were mains live. Glowing balls went zipping along the PCB tracks and as they passed each TTL chip it exploded with a POP! .

Amazingly after replacing the chips and wire linking some vaporised PCB tracks it still worked but it never did find out what was causing the wrong channel triggering.

[BasicReality]

If nobody sees you drop the expensive device, it never happened.

[stiine]

Honesty is the only policy. Besides, you'll never get to hear the old-timers' war stories if you dont' come clean.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Things That Never Happened (But Did)

Witnessed a not so bouncy rack server (In chassis) that fell off a internal fork lift at Research Machines.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Things That Never Happened (But Did)

In the early 80s we were getting a VAX 11/780 (¾ ton beast) installed. Fortunately it just fitted in the lift, the DEC team told us of one install they had done which required a crane and removal of a 3rd floor window. It got to 2nd floor height and one of the straps slipped...

[disgruntled yank]

Not a disk, and not me

Forty years ago, I worked for a company that used DG minicomputers as its platforms. The parallel output board was a modified tape-drive board, and for some reason was a bear to seat. If you included one-thumb push ups in your daily exercise routine, you were probably fine. If not, seating these boards meant strain and frustration. The head tech support rep when I got there said that you just about had to take a flying kick to seat them.

A couple of years later, a co-worker was at a customer site and called to have one of these units sent overnight. Nobody was particularly surprised at the request, and nobody inquired. It was some time later that I learned that the other guy, having exhausted what he had of patience, placed the board so that some inches extended out from the chassis, then gave it a kick. I am a bit surprised that the customer's manager didn't call and complain. The kicker, it is true, was laid off somewhat later, but this was in the nature of a reduction in force, when a couple of other people from other departments were laid off as well.

[Mast1]

Re: Not a disk, and not me

"The kicker, it is true, was laid off somewhat later, "

Sounds like a two-fold reduction in force........

[Phiphi in SoCal]

Probably not 10K RPM...

I worked for both of the big HD companies at that time, and IIRC the spindles were spinning at ~3600 rpm.

WD brought out the Raptor with 10K RPM spindles much later, initially with 3.5" media, and later 2.5" because... well... physics.

[Chz]

Re: Probably not 10K RPM...

They probably meant a Barracuda, as 7200rpm was brand new in 1992. Cheetahs didn't come until '96 and certainly not in sizes as small as 750MB.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Similar story

I have a similar story but a slightly different twist.

Our lab took delivery of a new "pizza box" Sun (a SPARC5 if memory serves) which was put on a shelf in the "server room" (really, just a closet with aggressive air conditioning and sliding glass doors) pending installation.

For some reason, which for the life of me I cannot recall, probably for reasons of abject humiliation, I found it "necessary" to pull the memory sticks out of the machine and, bonehead that I am, I used a pair of needlenose pliers to do so.

Circuit boards and delicate components obviously do not take well to such manhandling and I broke one of the sticks.

I quickly got on the phone with a memory vendor I knew and ordered replacements and paid for them out of my own pocket. It was at the time a considerable sum, at least for me on my rather modest university salary.

Fortunately, the machine wasn't scheduled to be brought on line for a week or so, the sticks arrived in time, and nobody was the wiser.

Nobody, except me, that is, since I gained much valuable wisdom about programmers and electrician's tools.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Similar story

Not to mention the little levers on each side of the DIMM slots that exist purely to pop them out?

[david_hay]

One Hank and it’s off

[gosand]

Back in the early 90s I worked at a major telecom company. I was building software, writing it to 9-track tapes, and installing it on the Tandem machines. They had these large 2GB disk drives that slid into the front of the cabinet. I needed to move one of them from one machine to another for some reason, and I shut down the one machine, removed the disk, and went to put it into the other... zap and a spark. I forgot to shut the new machine down. So I did, and reinserted the drive, and started it up. The machine was good but the drive didn't work. I reported it as a failed drive, and it was replaced.

Not sure how much that cost, but I am 100% sure they were not cheap.

[Robert Carnegie]

At least you had backup tapes......?

[JMcKeand]

The hard drive hammers and soda

At my last employer we had a couple of yellow acrylic hammers for the unsticking of drive heads. The instructions were to place the drive flat on the workbench and strike it with the head of the hammer parallel to the bench. It was a last resort type of thing. I only had to do it a couple of times and only worked once.

Also on my first day at said employer, I was working with another tech who always insisted that all work on a computer was to be done with the case open. I was in the process of installing DOS from 5 1/4” floppy disks when I knocked a large cup of soda (and ice) into the running machine (was on the floor next to the desk). I quickly hit the switch, luckily it was an old AT PC with the large mechanical switch on the back side. We took it back to the office. I spent the rest of the day disassembling it, washing the boards, drying, and reassembling the computer. Finished the DOS installation and as far as I know it ran fine.

[Robert Carnegie]

Re: The hard drive hammers and soda

This didn't change your colleague's mind about the open case thing??

[phuzz]

I used to work at a PC manufacturer, and one day I had to fetch a bunch of hard drives for imaging. They were in the warehouse, and were in a box on an upper shelf, just above my head. I managed to drop one, from above head height, directly onto a plywood floor.

Somehow it imaged just fine, and the finished computer passed QC, so I guess some hard drives are pretty tough. Or maybe it failed after a few weeks and the customer had to send it back. It wasn't my responsibility by that point.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Disks usually have a specified 'drop height ' that they'll survive

IIRC 1m isn't unusual, so 2m should be tolerable for some, especially onto something relatively soft like plywood.

[steviebuk]

I don't blame him

for not fessing up. Considering some companies can be real arseholes and despite being insured will try to make you pay.

I took a shortcut once as I've never had an issue with it at home, all the decades I've built PCs, building them on a carpet. I would also go slow and touch the metal case that was earthed (leaving the plug in the wall but the power off allowed it to be earthed). So, 1st line tech said her PC was playing up and freezing (I can't quite remember the issue) but knew I wanted to just move the PC and unplug the screen to plug it back in again.

As I was scrambling on the carpet, moving the PC, it made a small pop and turned off. I made an excuse and had it replaced. Appears either me dragging it caused static or the graphics card was already loose and moving it caused the whole thing to short, frying the motherboard.

Oops.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: I don't blame him

How I miss UK switched sockets & mains cables that exit said plug at 90 degrees.

Especially as I just completed a move with a narrow gap between desk & wall mounted industrial power socket.

[FeRDNYC]

“I was brimming with excitement to work on the latest tech, Novell NetWare 4.1!” he told The Register.

Or as we came to know it, Novell Net-WHERE??

[Terry 6]

Not a PC a washing machine

I hadn't paid to have it installed, but they were to remove packaging. So I set up the washing machine and put it on overnight.

In the morning it was in the middle of the kitchen floor. I 'd assumed that removing the packaging included the travel bolts.

They had assumed it didn't.

I think it did, but.......

[ComicalEngineer]

Dynamite

Working for a well known UK university on a government project in the late 80s were were loaned a PC owned by a government research centre (now sadly gone) called Warren Spring Laboratory.

This was one of the early PCs with a 4 colour video card and full height disc drives. WSL were just over 100 miles from us and so they sent the PC by courier. TNT no less, I kid you not.

When we unpacked it from the large cardboard box we found a 2" diameter hole in one side of the box and the PC made odd rattling noises when we lifted it out of the box.

Needless to say we decided to open it up only to find the highly expensive full length graphics card dislodged and various components rattling round inside the case.

Now the early PCs consisted of a substantial steel crate (bottom and 4 sides) with the motherboard at the bottom and full length cards running front to back. IIRC the crate was made out of 1.5mm steel and very solid.

We found a quarter inch deep dent in the front of the inner steel crate and a corresponding crack in the outer plastic cover.

Needless to say it was returned and an insurance claim made against the courier.

A couple of weeks later we received the repaired PC with a new graphics card delivered by a company estate car and driver.

From memory the PC cost as much as a brand new small hatchback (about £4,500 in the day) and the graphics card was over £500 of this.

TNT by name ...

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Dynamite

Ah yes, I remember TNT. VDUs delivered with smashed keyboard, and a pyramid-shaped hole in the side of the box that perfectly matched the corner of another box. They made Evri look competent.

[BigKev]

Back in the 80s a colleague of mine had "exaggerated" their driving skills to get the job - claiming they had a licence when they didn't, as they thought there would be little travel involved.

Alas, due to a double booking of engineers, he was required to deliver a new unix server to a customer.

On 'fessing up, he was told that the customer had been promised the install date and he'd better get to it - work booked him the train tickets (2 changes involved) and sent him on his way.

He said it was the worst experience he'd ever had - shifting the server (which was very heavy) onto the platform and leaving it there to go back and get the greenscreen monitor and then leaving both to get the box of keyboard and leads, then repeating it to move platforms and again onto the next train, repeat at the next station and finally into a taxi for the final destination.

I suspect it was a lesson well learned

[Montreal Sean]

A long time ago...

Back in the early 2000s, a little after starting my career at an international IT services company as a break-fix tech, i collected my day's parts and assignments.

As I was walking out of the building, a laptop HDD slipped out of its padded envelope, bounced across a road, and right into a puddle.

I called the company who sent us the warranty HDD and told them it made a strange ticking sound when I installed it in the laptop. No, nothing had happened to the HDD while in my possession...

I don't think any of us have made it through our careers without stupidly damaging some hardware!

[Bob Royal]

Call that a disk drive?

In the days of the late unlamented President Assad Senior, the (also late & unlamented) Plessey company flogged a load of tech to his military.

We did the PABXs, and one was co-located with an installation of Colour (WOW!) Radar.

This was a computer system including several disk drives which resembled a washing machine (top loading) of an earlier time.

They each had an interchangeable disk pack with several platters on a spindle, and which weighed a (metaphorical*) ton.

The whole lot stood on a raised floor which must have been installed by "Bodgeit & Scarper Carpet Fitters".

The spares kit, I was informed, had a single disk head. Bearing in mind that the disk packs had several platters, this was probably not a good plan.

Consequently, the local (Syrian Air Force) tech's were barred from the room until the whole job was commissioned and our tech's had left the country.

It was expected that the army style boots of the military clomping on the machine floor would destroy the whole job almost instantly.

* something between a metrical & an impirical unit.

[LateAgain]

This was back when drives had lifetime warranty

It would have been replaced.

Those were the days.

[JMaldonado64]

Hopefully nobody has an anecdote involving nuclear codes! :)

[ocelot]

I have pushed a spectrum analyzer sideways off its trolley, thinking it had four pivoting wheels instead of two. The analog tuning knob shafts were at a slight angle to the front panel afterwards. It still worked.

Bizarrely a few years later I was given a non-functional identical HP141T, that had once belonged to a completely different company.

I have dropped parked hard drives from waist height without issue, and totalled a running 500MB backup drive by sliding it off a drop of an inch from a book onto a table top.

[SierraD421]

Three words spring to mind for me here.

"Tucker did it."

Bonus points to anyone who gets the reference.

[Anonymous Coward]

A few years ago, I did tech support for a local Uni.

My primary responsibily was supporting a course that was completing a transition from a generic "Multimedia Technology" degree to a proper Film and TV production degree.

As such, we had bought a *lot* of very expensive equipment, including two Red One, and two Arri Alexa cameras (which were roughly £100k each).

For the sound part of the course, they also bought a pair of powered high quality PA speakers from Genelec.

These were about £800 each.

While unpacking them, I decided to test one, by plugging it in. I did not realise a couple of things. First, the speaker was switched on, so the second it got power, the amplifier powered up. Second, this was a problem, as the amplifier could overload with no input.

So, the second I plugged it in, the amplifier blew. Loudly. I was confused, and slightly worried, so I googled. I did find several pages online stating you should NEVER power up the speaker without an input. TBF, the manual did state this, but at the time, I was of the opinion that manuals were for noobs, not experienced techies like me..

Thankfully, I was able to persude both my colleagues, and the supplier that it was genuinly a faulty device, and they repaired it for free.