Posts by Robert Carnegie

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: The FAX is not dead yet.

I think your story is a bit muddled, including using pronouns "they" and "them" apparently for different entities separated by one other word.

I'd guess that replacing the disk drive was indeed motivated by security, but that either the technician removed the drive so that data could be recovered -- and maybe drives failed often enough (some certainly did) to make replacing it a default action - or else the user removed the drive before the technician arrived, to stop the data from being stolen.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Oh dear, this is starting to feel familiar.

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I don't know if someone has suggested it, but perhaps "William" and the OS/2 update weren't solely responsible for the comms bill. Maybe someone else at the same time was downloading, what did they call it, warez. Or alternatively, what they call now, nudes.

Or, would a third party e-mail service charge for data storage? Some of them do that now. So watch out for those video presentation attachments.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Re: Why?

So not "DROP TABLE Email" then. (hypothetical)

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Yes but... we have a development server with quite a lot of menus and other objects named "test" or "temporary" or "roger"(*) - one of the developers is (not) named Roger and they tend to leave these little presents for the rest of us from time to time. Some housecleaning does seem like a good idea.

Re: Have you exploded in a fit of rage due to the frustrations of work?

It sounds like the second story might have turned out, "I told him just to do it, so he did it, and our very large bespoke system suddenly was not very large at all." But it didn't.

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

Re: Fairly Minor but...

12th November - "Thousands of NHS staff in England to lose jobs" (admin and managerial) according to BBC.

Was held up because the Treasury hadn't approved the redundancy pay bill.

Well, maybe there will be apps and AI and that sort of thing, to make up for it.

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Isn't it cheaper just to have a regular extension cord plugged into itself? ;-)

The sign on a switch also should say what and why. Come to think... I am in favour of labelling switches at home as well, just to say what they are. Particularly at one relative's place, where one of three switches is the bathroom light. And yet I haven't done it at home. Project.

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

Do you mean "internal mail", since you were typing and printing your documents and then sending them to the typing pool to be typed again. On a typewriter, I take it.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Re: I''m Steve

One quibble left is that the "Who, Me?" stories are ones where you get away with it... but checking the terms, I see the word "usually". So you're good. ish. And so is your ex-ex-boss.

"Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you admit to mistakes that almost trashed your career."

"Who, Me? is a weekly column in which our readers confess to catastrophes they created in the pursuit of IT excellence - and usually managed to get away with."

I wonder if you e-mail to whom@reg instead of whome, it is for stories from people who did something so terrible that they and their name are erased from corporate memory?

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Re: Er ...

Once upon a time (later 20th century), Japanese product was regarded as trash, and it may have been. Fake lookalike products also were alleged. Then, probably with a well known effort, they got good.

The same was said about industrial China.

The same was said in Australia about British products, cars in particular - according to Clive James.

There's probably poor quality work everywhere.

I think the styled-like-fluorescent battery lamp I saw and carefully didn't buy, whose long opaque light box had an incandescent flashlight bulb inside, was from China. But that may mean Taiwan.

I don't see your argument. With a higher minimum wage, some people still will leave school earlier to work (about three o'clock according to one story), but be paid more?

But if you have something like Scotland's "Education Maintenance Allowance" - paying students who stay in school - then more of them will. Let's hope that it is worth the money.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: Another one

"Narcissus" performed by Norman Wisdom and Joyce Grenfell comes to mind for this.

Alternatively you could write a carefully worded limerick - output one word at a time - and make just inside the bounds of acceptability. (But, include a safety margin.)

Include several different versions, and either cycle through them or choose randomly.

Let's see -

The famous "Mechanical Turk"

Took longer than this for its work.

In fact there would hide

An accomplice inside.

So sit and be patient, you see it will get done eventually.

Re: Intelligence test

Saying "9 out of 10" is (nearly) a good save. It lets the customer be the 1 in 10 who does know what he's doing, but the software doesn't know what he's doing.

If it executes, then the user probably won't see the SQL code, either. I could guess:

- It's in exception handling code which was not invoked during testing, e.g. "customer has more than 100 children" is an error, actual customer is a boarding school.

- Microsoft SQL (maybe others too) allows both "CHECKSUM(*)" and also user-defined function programming. I don't know if that stretches to writing "myfunction(*)" but if it does, then I suppose that a developer who had a habit of leaving out letter o could write a function with the altered name which calculates the correct result anyway.

- Since count is a reserved word, you also might want to write something like "SELECT CustomerName, COUNT(*) AS Counts GROUP BY CustomerName ORDER BY CustomerName" and actually it was "Counts" that was misspelled.

UTF-8 is just ASCII with pretensions - but recently I've only used "strings" on video files to find metadata which for whatever reason isn't otherwise available, and that's not the same thing as examining executable binaries.

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

Re: Interns

A printout error? I know what is the remedy for that. A pen is.

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: Labor Hire Company?

If there's nuance, and there may not be, "labor hire" may mean providing a company's core needs using "temporary" employees. So that except for managers maybe, no one who works there really works there. It doesn't strike me as a good idea, or necessarily a legal one.

Re: Employment tribunal

Is that when they made it two years?

Re: Some managers are OK,

If he was interested in positions in the adult film industry... (well, who isn't? there are awards. :-)

Re: Excel

I'm getting that when I work on "codeword" puzzles (substitution cipher crosswords) where one of the techniques is to count how many number 1s are in the puzzle. While it's possible that there are three and they represent the letter E, it's unlikely. The point is, it's quite easy to miscount, up or down - even when, my tip, dividing the crossword grid first into multiple sets of 3 columns, and scanning one of these big columns at a time.

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

You can find online - very probably not legally - the late Isaac Asimov's short story "The Fun They Had", in which two children in the future examine an old-type book, and wonder why the words don't move or change when you page forward and back like on screen, and do you just have to throw the book away when you finish reading.

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Re: Ping

Triangle (musical instrument) is a thing that goes ting, not ping.

Re: Ping pointed the finger

Asymptomatic and infectious.

For an somewhat challenging introduction to the subject, Wikipedia has a good article on "MAC address". It stands for "medium access control", with "medium" meaning the network. "As typically represented, MAC addresses are recognizable as six groups of two hexadecimal digits, separated by hyphens, colons, or without a separator", and every "NIC (network interface controller)" in the world is meant to have a different MAC address. Data is sent on the local network from one NIC to another using the MAC address to select the destination NIC.

This causes trouble when a manufacturer actually releases NICs which have the same MAC address as each other. They are meant not to do that.

If you do have a duplicated card, then you may have to throw it away. "Many network interfaces, however, support changing their MAC addresses" - for instance with a software command while the host boots up or connects - so you could do that and set an acceptable MAC address, or even a random hexadecimal number as the address - I refer you to Wikipedia for reasons to do that. A genuinely random address is extremely unlikely to be a duplication.

I'm not certain but I think that if your local networking connects every host directly to a central device (hub), then the local network may have only your host and the hub talking to each other by MAC address anyway - or something like that - and then it wouldn't matter.

For a while, some software licensing and copyright protection depended on the software being used on a computer with one MAC address that you'd paid for. You could possibly override that by replacing the NIC and then setting its MAC address to the required number. Reasonably of course - PCs and network devices do fail and need to be replaced.

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Re: Rather the opposite ...

"previous generation of winners" I assume, but perhaps you told it right, after all?

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: been there, done that ...

I think it's ntpd on the client which "panics", perhaps slightly misnamed as apparently ntpd writes a goodbye note in the relevant log, then terminates itself.

Apparently this is where ntpd says that it can't see an ntp server. Or it may be that the command line finds the client ntpd not running.

The story seems to be confused about whether just one client machine was not taking time from the ntp server, or all of them. I don't trust vagueness, but I'm inclined to interpret it as two problems to solve: (1) each client have a different time from the server, and (2) ntpd on clients doesn't work. Manually rebooting one client with time already corrected will address (1) and also (2), but restarting client ntpd without setting time wont' work, because ntpd will just panic again.

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

Re: Blame the dates

Flu vaccine may make you feel fluey, in my experience first time especially. Then, whether the flu strain you catch is the one that the flu vaccine makers expected you to catch is a bit random - they have to guess it a long time in advance. I've caught fairly terrible flu during Christmas after buying a vaccination with my own money.

I think my first COVID-19 vaccine made me unfit to be working for about a day - but I didn't die, and that's the main point. As with the flu. Ideally.

Re: Blame the dates

I recently found a can of soup which is about 2 years past its "best before" date - I think I won't rely on your recommendation. It's still in the house because I am waiting for the recycling date for food waste and also steel cans, which I will separate - also paper!

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Re: How did you get in here?

(And the Star Trek thing doesn't need to have more than one door.)

(I don't know how that works in Futurama's "suicide booth" which is easily mistaken for a telephone kiosk if that's what you're expecting. That's less disintegrating and more julienning.)

Re: How did you get in here?

The Star Trek thing you describe sounds more like the machine that disintegrates people counted as casualties in the war games. Bring a book or a newspaper, because there's a queue. A short book will do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon

Sysadmin cured a medical mystery by shifting a single cable

Re: Spiriting patient data off into a murder basement? Whatever for?

BBC news, June 2025: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1ljg7v0vmpo

"Every newborn baby in England will have their DNA mapped to assess their risk of hundreds of diseases, under NHS plans for the next 10 years.

"The scheme, first reported by the Daily Telegraph,, external is part of a government drive towards predicting and preventing illness, which will also see £650m invested in DNA research for all patients by 2030."

I haven't read the Daily Telegraph article, so I don't know if the point was recognised that this means the government will have everybody's DNA who was born after a certain date, without the individual's consent. I think the Daily Telegraph will be all for that. And also for genetic selection for school or university admission, like "GATTACA". The Telegraph is "that" sort of "news". (I don't mean dystopian science fiction, just dystopian generally.)

Re: You can't do this and not tell anyone!

Since he is the only IT person, there is no one that he can ask "why was it like that". And I'd guess that it was "because we do all our networking by cabling every device network port to a wall socket". And a wiring chart might possibly exist, but I know a manager who would hold that a well designed network is its own chart.

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

Or someone in the building might have a crowbar.

Re: "Outdated" manuals

I'm not sure if here is where I wanted to put this, but it's from Douglas Adams's novel, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish". When electronic book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has just been updated over sub-ether, or some nonsense like that.

"Ford flipped the switch which he saw was marked 'Mode Execute Ready' instead of the now old-fashioned 'Access Standby' that had so long ago replaced the appallingly stone-aged 'Off.'"

If he was alive today, he could sue Microsoft for stealing the idea of changing the names of things that were fine before - except that appearing here implies that reality invented it first. Offhand, the example I'm thinking of is "Intellisense" as the new name for "spelling", but there are better ones.

Re: Manuals

Ah, FLV video (somewhere in there) - that takes me back, and leaves me there, waiting for something to happen, that won't. I'm confident it worked then - but it doesn't now.

Re: Manuals...

"Bing" is a Scottish word with several meanings, but the relevant one is "a heap of rubbish". Such as an large artificial hill of waste material next to a coal mine, for instance.

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Re: Swap

Hmm, maybe date-stamp any labels. So that you know how "current" the identity is.

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

That would be technically not a "modem" I think, but in practice very similar. Was this before or after another sort of revolution in South Africa? Just an idle thought.

Re: Great "Who, Me?"

Dictionary.com allows rule and ruler but not slide-ruler, though the last term is at least moderately present in Google results - I don't seem to be getting a count of results today. A rule specifically is a tool to draw a straight line, but putting length measurements on the rule is obviously useful. Ruler means either a straight line rule or a person who uses one. "Rule" may be preferred in the UK, but I had a reasonably respectable education in the 1970s and 80s and we had rulers. Would you draw a line with a slide rule, or are they too precious to be used like that?

Re: A similar youthfully exuberant and expensive lesson

Maybe it was a real therapist - or just made to seem realistic - since they are expensive.

Re: Cheap rate calls

The script maybe doesn't exactly have a bug, it operates as designed... it constructs file transfer batches inside the 56k file size limit, and then it makes a call, transfers the data, disconnects I think, then makes a call immediately to send another 56k file, and so on. It might be using a tool which splits a larger file into smaller files of x bytes. If the call doesn't connect then it redials.

If it doesn't stop making calls when there is no more data, then that's a bug. And the librarian's version of the script works by including multiple 56k files in one phone call, not one at a time, that's probably going to be cheaper.

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Re: all the plastic parts turn to goo

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_alcohol_fuel

Ethanol-enriched fuel was "the future" by U.S. government mandate, 20 years ago.

"Between 1997 and 2002, three million U.S. cars and light trucks are produced which could run on E85, a blend of 85% ethanol with 15% gasoline. Almost no gas stations sell this fuel however. [at that time, evidently.]"

I'm just guessing that gasoline-powered tools at that time were built for ethanol, too. If you have manuals for those, it may be mentioned there.

Wolfspeed to file for Chapter 11 in deal cutting 70% of debt

Re: Curious

The story says this:

"Trade had suffered at the hands of the Trump administration's policy shift away from prioritizing electric vehicles and renewable energy production. Wolfspeed revenues for those nine months fell to $560.6 million from $606.5 million in 2024.

"Wolfspeed was in line for $750 million worth of US CHIPS Act funding with the caveat that it settled a debt payment in 2026. That agreement was terminated once the Biden administration was booted out at the last election."

So, they'd had direct government support - withdrawn by the new administration in 2025 apparently - and investment in the renewable energy and electric vehicle markets - also cancelled by the new administration.

You could say that they bet the wrong way for Trump, but the things they set out to do are the things that they're good at.

I'd say that a business plan which is completely skewered if fossil industry politics gets back in the driving seat would mean always watching out for being stabbed in the back. I suppose they could diversify into heated tobacco. Maybe they have.

It's not exactly the same thing, but "CHIPS" was originally formulated as a "Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America Act", according to Wikipedia. I think the article is stale, but it says, "During Donald Trump's 2025 speech to a joint session of Congress, the president asked House Speaker Mike Johnson to 'get rid' of the subject act."

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: PEBCAK

I haven't used it recently - banned at work at present - but "AutoHotkey" is a free scriptable Windows utility which amongst other things, can send messages to windows to control their position and size. For a situation of windows moving inconveniently, it could be used to run a script to move windows to pre-set places where you want them to appear. Mainly it's designed to turn keystrokes into one more more different keystrokes, i.e. macros, but it also can be made to run a script of actions once and terminate, or to sleep a few seconds or until the PC is idle, then execute the same actions again. Again, when I last saw it, its scripting language was tricky.

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

I don't know what vehicles in "Judge Dredd" run on, but I'll bet against gasoline unless they make a bio-version using their "soylent" technology.

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

Re: At my last place....

Hmm. I think that versions of this problem that I've seen described previously included birds perching on your hardware - that's what I expected - and trees either breaking out in leaves seasonally, or simply growing tall enough to stand in the way of he signal. I don't think we've had "a queue of hay wagons at the traffic lights" before, but cows maybe in a field that was cowless when the link was installed? And I don't remember the one with fog, either.

Re: At my last place....

High-ceilinged Victorian school rooms are a nuisance to heat if you're inclined to have heating. Otherwise, I'd like to ask how many buildings of that date (let's say whenever universal education was introduced, relatively late I think) are no longer standing, either from bad construction or because of a pressing need to knock them down and build something better suited to the purpose. What we see is the survivors, some of which are only intact because if you knock them down then you let the asbestos out. According to Wikipedia, "The use of fire-proof asbestos became increasingly widespread toward the end of the 19th century", with a list of building trade uses mentioned. Then it got stopped - in most of the world - because it causes nasty disease, mostly in the lungs and slowly fatal if you're lucky. "Outside Europe and North America", says Wikipedia - and specifically in Russia - asbestos use continues. Hmm.

‘Deliberate attack’ deletes shopping app’s AWS and GitHub resources

Re: Curious enough to look at his X posting :(

I don't know if it's the answer in this case, but cellphones can do a lot.