Reply to post: Re: My favourite one....

We know it's hard to get your kicks at work – just do it away from a wall switch powering anything important

BigBadAl
Paris Hilton

Re: My favourite one....

Your comments remind me of a story my late father told me in the late 70's. I was 12 years old and it was the first funny 'risky' work story he told me. he worked for a council in the accounts dept, back then no computers... yet. the typists were using high end IBM electric typewriters. There was a particularly fierce women in charge of the typists. She started complaining to my father that two of these 'IBM' units were faulty. Then that they were all faulty. They had about 20 of them in this one dept - so it was a big deal. The IBM sales rep duly pushed for the engineer to visit - repeatedly with no fault found each time. Tempers flared and the poor support tech was dispatched with the order 'don't come back until it is fixed'. The issue was a simple one - the typewriters would randomly add spaces to the text - back then that meant the whole letter needed to be re-written. What no one had bothered to tell my father or the support guy was that this only happened with one user - 'a rather large buxom girl' as my dad told me! When it happened to her she would just change desks and the same thing would happen. The poor engineer pulled my dad out of the room once he had seen this happen and was very red faced as he knew the issue but couldn't fix it with the user at her desk. Turns out... yup that a part of her body was hitting the space bar and causing the issue. The teams tea break was due (yes they did all leave at 10.15am for a break) and my dad and the poor red faced support tech had to explain to the fierce boss what was going on. The solution was elegant - the typewriters were heavy and came with IBM desks - the desks had adjustable feet in the legs so the engineer dropped the desk by 2 inches and the issue went away. Needless to say no one had the courage to explain the issue to the operator. Different times indeed!!

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