News: 1617951919

... running to the mobile phone charging station at 06:30 AM.

It was an anonymous call they called the wrong number and didn't even apologize.

When I showed up with a cane at a customer meeting,at 09:00 AM the customer told me I should have cancelled the meeting instead of going through the agony of driving there and walking around in agony.

I tell people I once dislocated my toe playing Monopoly...

Well, it was actually more due to getting the Monopoly box from off the top of a tall wardrobe in a bedroom. I wasn't wearing shoes and the box was just out of reach. So I jumped up, grabbed the box successfully and landed. It was only when I started walking away that I realised something was wrong and discovered that the second toe on my left foot was pointing straight upwards at the second joint. I clicked it back into place and then had to suffer a swollen toe and limping for several days. What fun!

(And, no, I can't even remember whether or not I won the game of Monopoly.)

Does anyone win? I thought they just went on and on until everyone lost interest.

Or mass murder ensues.

Was working in an academic environment. I got rung one Sunday afternoon while painting my garage to be told that our mail server was down.

Checked. It was fully functional. So I phone the august academic back. He was adamant that our server was down because the PC in his bedroom couldn't email the PC in the kitchen.

When I told him to check those two boxen before annoying me again he tried to demand a house-call. He only desisted when I told him the chargeout rate.

I'd have gone & claimed the full callout & travel time, to ensure he really learned the lesson!

And a surcharge due to having to start all over again on the garage.

In-house guy first time solo on nights, uni graduate in Electronic Engineering has spent weeks shadowing engineers & following in-house training servicing humping great Xerox printers that sent you those lovely envelopes from Sun Alliance life insurance in Swindon (Actually in the tower block that was above Debenhams) full of an Amazon rain forest by-product.

Thus the 3am call came....both printers have got an issue & up the stairs like a gazelle he sprinted, ran through the diagnostics & was forced to admit he was stumped.

He escalated to his On-Call Manager, who walked him through some steps that he hadn't previously considered.....

Was there power coming from in the fucking great big wall socket or present in the printer, (To whit the answer was no & the response of then it's not our fucking problem is it!) which concluded with the strongly & expletive laden.

"Come & see me in the morning for a fucking clue in basic diagnostic procedures, before you go off shift!".

The clever ones can be sooooo stupid :-)

.. or possibly too clever to actually think about the problem.

At 3 am thinking isn't necessarily available, not even as an optional extra.

Brunei is dry country last time I checked. The drinks would be pretty cheap for a bar tab.

Unless he went to a speak easy. In which case, keep the name anonymous.

Anon because I've been to a few over there. Interesting times but only Budwiser or Tiger beer to drink and the small cocktail menu (kept in a crate just incase it had to move quickly).

No, I'm sorry, but when I was there (yes, I am the "Andrew"), it was not dry. At least, not for the ex-pats.

We also had a "club" you joined called the ditch diggers - you got into it if, when driving home from the last round of alcohol induced party, your car/truck went into a ditch. It had quite a few members.

Ahh, I was there visiting one of the rare non-Muslim locals (now a very high ranking doctor) so things seemed quite restricted at the time as they'd been cracking down on drinking and as for ditch digging.. No, we avoided that one.

We did however find out that the wading depth of a Merc E Class appeared to 3 inches deeper than the float depth of a range rover... That was a fun event time on one of the main highways. Avoided the police completely since their vans had water to the roofs and the cars beneath the waves.

...the agony with which all those who have lifted something silly will be familiar (ours was an incident involving a washing machine, some stairs and the overconfidence of youth – you?)

Re-arranging the furniture in a meeting room at work. Picked up a table in the wrong position (me, that is, as well as the table) and bang! - something just went in my back.

Phoned up my wife to accompany me home - Tube and train out of London to the sticks - and had a few days off work, after which I thought I was fine.

But if I had had any inkling of the amount of pain that recurrences would give me over the years since then, I'd have sued the arse off my employer.

Many years ago I was helping set up and be a casualty for a 48hour SAR exercise on an uninhabited island off Scotland. On the Wednesday I had several trips between shore and the island in an inflatable ferrying food and assorted supplies for the support team. There were two of us on that shift and we then set about creating a range of rescue scenarios. I also carried several containers of water and a couple of portable generators up a hill to an abandoned lighthouse that would be the basecamp for the support team.

The support team and the SAR team on the exercise arrived on the Thursday in their own boats and the exercise commenced. I recall one scenario where I was buried under a collapsed building; I was to be unconscious (per the scenario) so quiet (making it harder to find me) but also unable to help myself out (and also unable to feel pain as I was hauled unceremoniously out)!

The exercise ended on the Saturday morning and everyone mucked in to clean up and get all the kit back to the mainland, cleaned and returned to a local store. I recall hauling generators out of the van and carrying them into the store. We then had a cup of tea and the first debrief. Washing up the cups I turned to pick up a tea towel and put my back out!

That's my excuse for, ever since, refusing to help with the washing up - too risky for my back :)

('er indoors doesn't accept the excuse, of course)!

That's what we in the camel game call 'the final straw'. It's not for nothing that cliché relates to the back and not say, the final cup of tea and the side table.

Not actually being on call is no block to being [1] phoned up in the middle of the night , even when you're towards the end of the Friday night beer batch run.

[1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/01/03/on_call/#c_3944038

Some of us of a certain age and experience will have been called on to complete a light map when the mighty mainframe has ground to a halt in an undiagnosable manner. Simpler times, when the state of the processor can be written down on (an admittedly large) sheet of paper.

Working for a small oil+gas services company, softwarev dev, systems admin, All Things Tech. The Boss is over in Saudi hawking our latest changes to $ENORMO_OIL_CO and encounters a licence problem on AIX. I'm at my partner's in St Albans, we're both sleeping off a heavy night in the pub. 02:00 the phone downstairs rings ... and rings ... and rings ... and rings. She goes and answers it, comes upstairs and tips a glass of water over me. "It's your fucking boss" as she falls face first (mostly) on the bed and zonks out. I fall down the stairs - still absolutely bladdered - and gibber down the phone. He won't leave me alone, and somehow manages to persuade me to try and sober up for half an hour and he'll phone me back. Buzzing on mainlined nescafe and satched and cold from the shower and now just pissed rather than palatic, I pick up the phone before it wakes her up. I mumble him through using vi and, yep, the licence file *has* been edited on Windows and has carriage returns in it and here's how to get rid. All working, sale made, Happy Boss.

When he's back in the office I tackle him about it. Fortunately she was too drunk to remember much about it and the relationship survived, but how did the bastard get her number? He smiled "The office manager lives round the corner from the office, so I phoned her and got her to look through the phone bills and find a St Albans number, and it was dialled from your extension so there we are".

Fair dos, he gave me a day off and promised never to do it again.

The office manager lives round the corner from the office, so I phoned her and got her to look through the phone bills and find a St Albans number, and it was dialled from your extension

Fair bit of detective work and it was urgent and work related. Nowadays it won't work as just about everybody uses a cell phone for private business. On the other hand, nowadays he probably would have had that number already, so less (chance of) strain on the relationship.

we didn't have a formal on-call arrangement and "work-related" doesn't mean a lot at two in the morning on a Saturday. I only didn't tell him to fuck off because I liked him and didn't want to drop him in the poo.

Nowadays he would defo *not* have had the number and there aren't enough strong men in the county to get me back on to on-call status ... I've done my stint, some other bugger's turn

All that aside, there's a worrying tendency in modern Bossery to say things like "work-life balance? work *is* life" (that's a quote, and it made my mind up about leaving that job) and to want to impinge too far into your personal life. They pay for your skills and a set amount of your time, anything after that is a separate negotiation, which can usefully begin with what's being offered for the extra work rather than a presumption that you'll do it for nothing

I was the back-up on call. Previous night I had a heavy beer session (the one and only time I've ever got plastered on beer - I learnt my lesson).

Sunday morning, 08:30, I get called. Primary person not responding, and I need to go into work. And I feel ROUGH. I mean vomit-comet rough. So I persuade a family member to drive me to work, where I was promptly sick (pepto-bizmo tastes a lot worse coming back up than it does going down).

Still, I sort out the problem, get back home and crawl back under the rock I'd ventured from.

The primary on call person called me later in the afternoon and it turned out the on-call phone battery had run flat! He said he'd get me a beer to make up for it, but that just made me feel very queezy..... :D

Back in the day I worked on a lot of T-carrier stuff. I can't tell you how many times an owner/client ranted about a shiny new (fractional) T1/E1 link being down, how the equipment was shit, the field guys were incompetent, and how pretty much everybody involved with the installation should be taken out behind the barn & horsewhipped. Most of the time[0], it was an incorrectly set loopback switch on the new node. Seems bosses in general can't resist flipping switches ... and can't read blinkenlights.

Sometimes I'd casually reached out and toggle the loopback switch, thus fixing the link and painting the boss's face an interesting shade of red when I presented him with the bill reading nothing more than "Call out. Flipped loopback switch. $1,000" on an official invoice.

But once in a while, after inspecting the node, I'd stand aside & motion the boss through the door before me. While he had his back to me, I'd flip the switch ... and we'd go off to his office for a chat about fixing the obviously broken machine. I'd let him rant on for several minutes, around 20 was the record, but always ending up with something along the lines of "so what are you going to do about it, then?". To which I would quietly reply "Oh, I've already fixed it. We'll invoice you for the call out". Sometimes the resulting sputtering reached epic proportions ...

[0] The rest of the time it was a cable that had fallen out of the CSU/DSU because it hadn't been screwed down properly. We always took the blame for that, even if it was their guys bolting stuff together. We've all done it, we're only human, I'll take the blame, no charge ... sometimes it's handy to have a friendly couple of faces in a client's datacenter who probably won't ever try to throw you under a bus.

Do you have that one on copy/paste? I've read it before.

Yeah, bloody repeats! The Reg forum is getting as bad as TV for this!!!

(Actually, I shouldn't complain, I've told my "washing my balls" story at least twice here - no, I'm not going to repeat it again, go look it up.)

Yes, true. I was having sex around 3:00am with the missus, when the operator called.

I tried to still continue, while holding the phone, but when the operator told me of the issue,

aka about a totally SHITE file transfer tool, completely mandatory for operations, which was us support staff

the worst nightmare ever, meaning my night was over, I completely failed to still being motivated.

It was a nice try, but complete failure.

Worst of all was the dude tone: "Hello ... . How are you doing ? ", etc ...

Obviously, someone was, um, accessing the wrong orifice...

The Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder is a brilliant historical account of Data General building the successor to the Eclipse, when debugging involved blinkenlights, oscilloscopes, and wire wrappers.

Talking of light, many eons ago, the organisation I was working for got one of the first Intel Hypercubes that were allowed out of the US (export restrictions). The debugging software was f*ng awful, but it had red and green lights that indicated communications and processing. These came to be invaluable in debugging and optimising thre codes we were writing (parallel Fortran with a McFarland comp[iler - the one with the infamous "this error should never occur" compile message).

I've gotten a call to race to a D level's assistant because the printer won't, and the D level needed this document for a meeting that started 10 minutes ago... turn up to find the printer is only out of paper! I always left the area saying when your stapler is out of staples...

What is this 'Red and Green' of which you speak? To my eyes, and approx 1 in 10 of all men, there was just yellowish and yellowish. (Modern LEDs can manage a more usable saturation level, but then blue is considered cooler.)

And some severe cluebattery due to whoever thought it cool to have them appear in the same place.

Many years ago we had an engineer that lived just around the corner from one of our customers. They had a system down at around 7am but he didn't start work (or answer his phone) till 8am. They rang him repeatedly but no answer. So they sent one of their mixer trucks to his house and it sat outside with the drum turning until he answered the phone. They were told to never do that again.

This past summer here at the at the southern hemisphere I was visiting a relative of my wife, on one of those strange non-lockdown moments. They convinced me to fire up a BBQ, on an improvised grill. After puffin my way through the roasting for over two hours, I swear I got more smoked than the meat!

When I called everyone to the table and finished cutting the pieces, ready to serve it, I got the dreaded call from the Senior DPE of the account. He told me the UNIX support team in India needed my help because there was a major issue they were unable to resolve by themselves (they hadn't told him what was it because "it was urgent"), so my seniority was called for. I looked at the tray fill of meat I was holding and everyone who had just sat to the table with my most miserable face, put the tray on the table, and proceeded to lock myself up in one of the bedrooms.

Downloaded WebEx to my phone, looked for the meeting info, called in. There were a couple of customers reps screaming and cursing. I waited until they stopped to catch a breath, introduced myself and asked to be briefed. Some VM was deleted in error and there was no backup. I suggest a recovery procedure, the support team tells me they already were working on it. Then I asked why did you summoned me here, they tell me their on call backup was sick and they weren't sure who should they put in to take over this incident, since the primary on call guy was wasted after a night of major issues. All in all, I spent 45 minutes on the call until they finally came clean to me.

That certainly blew up my lid. I excused me out from the customer's call, called the support team's manager and proceeded to explain he had another 16 resources to rotate the secondary on call before calling me in, since I certainly wasn't part of the support team in the first place. All in all, his shady move was motivated by the general lack of skills in his team, so in a pinch he decided it was safer to bother all the chain of command up and pull me into the issue to see if they could persuade me to complete the recovery. I told him I didn't bring my laptop with me, I was three hours away from it, and I certainly wasn't thinking of driving back anytime soon, since nobody had ever requested for me to be part of the on call escalation.

Then I wrote a chat to the Senior DPE and explained him why I was summoned, how I lost my well earned BBQ, and how I was having it over an hour after everyone else, poorly re-heated in the microwave oven. He answered a couple of hours later telling me he had given the support team's manager quite a shake and promising to never call me in again without knowing all the details.