At DEC's headquarters in Maynard
disk drives in one of the computer rooms would experience brief bursts of read errors during the day. Simultaneously. But not all of them, some appeared to be utterly unaffected. The read errors were diagnosed to be track misalignment errors, and when one of the field engineers noticed the building going *bump* being what triggered a slew of errors the problem was fairly quickly pinpointed to be trucks backing up into the loading docks below. The affected drives had linear head positioners aligned with the direction of the impact; those that had them at right angles didn't care.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
