Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time
- Reference: 1751872932
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/07/07/who_me/
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This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Helen" who explained she once wrote a batch script that racked up a $2,000 phone bill for her local library – back in 1991 when that was real money.
I was truly afraid for my life in that moment
In her defense, she was seven years old at the time.
Helen came to coding at that tender age after striking difficulties at the small rural school she attended in the US State of Missouri.
Testing eventually found she was dyslexic and possessed reading and comprehension skills well beyond her years. That combination didn't go well in some classes, so Helen was sent for "tutoring" in the school library, which doubled as the small town's library too.
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Helen initially didn't learn much in those sessions, which mostly involved helping the librarian to dust shelves and replace books. She did those jobs so well, however, that the librarian recognized her intelligence and allowed her to work on his pet project, which involved uploading information to enable inter-library loans.
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This was 1991, so uploading anything was hard. Helen recalls the program she used had a buffer of 56 kilobytes and would crash if asked to store more data. She also recalls a very finicky modem that seldom connected the first time because the line was needed for voice traffic.
She therefore became adept at figuring out how to prepare just under 56 KB of data to upload, then trying to make a connection to enable the upload.
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This was, of course, incredibly boring.
Not long afterwards, Helen found a book about DOS in the library, read it, and used her precocious vocabulary and powers of comprehension to learn about batch scripting.
Not many days later, Helen wrote a script that prepared uploads and auto-dialed the modem in the middle of the night – neatly avoiding the trouble she encountered trying to use the line during daylight hours.
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Helen was precocious, but the vagaries of the US telecoms industry had not piqued her interest. So while she was aware that long distance phone calls were expensive, she had no idea her script meant the library was about to make a lot of them at more than a dollar a minute.
Nobody noticed for a month until the library received a phone bill – a big one that vastly exceeded its budget.
[6]Junior sysadmin's first lines of code set off alarms. His next lot crashed the company
[7]Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown
[8]Techie exposed giant tax grab, maybe made government change the rules
[9]Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe
"I got to school, and the librarian was on the phone," Helen told Who, Me? She listened to his animated conversation with what sounded like a security company, who he tried to convince really should have detected whoever it was that snuck into the library at night to make long distance calls.
"He was really angry, shouting and cursing and slamming books, which was totally out of character," Helen wrote. "I was terrified. And then he yelled 'Every morning at exactly 1:00 AM they make the first call' and I realized it was me."
Helen stood in front of the librarian and made it plain she needed to talk. He covered the phone's handset. Helen took a deep breath and explained she was the source of the calls.
"He just stared at me, and I was truly afraid for my life in that moment," she told Who, Me?
Helen then ran to the PC she used to write the script, opened the file, and pointed at it.
"The librarian stretched the long curly phone cord far enough that he could see the screen, looked at it for what felt like an hour but was probably only 15 seconds, and then he just hung up on the alarm company," she told Who, Me?
"He quietly, so quietly, told me to go back to class, and to never run another script without him seeing it first," Helen wrote. And then he debugged the script so it worked without racking up huge phone bills.
"To this day, I have no idea how that phone bill got paid, or what the next bill looked like," Helen told Who, Me?
Helen eventually became a consultant who specializes in fixing technical crises caused by teams who find themselves out of their depth.
"I get it straightened out, upgraded, expanded, and thoroughly documented," she told Who, Me?
"However, I am ashamed to admit that I still have not mastered the patience and restraint that the librarian demonstrated under pressure that day," she said. "But I am working on it."
"Who, Me?" is enormously thankful to Helen for sharing this amazing story. If you have a similar tale to tell, we welcome it. Just [10]click here to send us an email. ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/30/who_me/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/23/who_me/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/16/who_me/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/09/who_me/
[10] mailto:whome@theregister.com
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Sounds like a life-lesson well-learned at a young age. Leaving a bright 7-year-old in charge of a computer system connected to the internet (even in its primitive state at the time) without supervision is of course asking for trouble.
I made a similar unsupervised mistake while out from school on some work experience (though at a rather more advanced age...): there was difficulty getting access to an interactive terminal, so I thought I'd use the Remote Job Entry console, which lay mostly unused, to send a batch job off to the mainframe in an adjacent room by dialling in. I assumed (wrongly) that the phone line was attached to the internal switchboard like all the others, so the call would be free, and that anyway the RJE terminal would hang up when the transmission finished. Quite why they'd installed a separate line for RJE or why it wasn't disconnected I never found out - but the combination was unfortunate because I submitted the job on a Friday afternoon and the operators didn't notice the persistent connection until Monday morning. Fortunately, the large computer manufacturer's other expenditure meant that the cost went largely unremarked. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
Soon after my period of training ended, I was given a smallish project to handle in its entirety: Assess, cost, quote and then handle the whole shebang, ordering parts, installing and commissioning. Two-thirds of the way through the contract I realised that I had forgotten to include a key component. It was expensive......
I confessed to my Chief who shrugged and said "These things happen".
I explained to the customer the reason for the delay in completion and he responded: "Include the costs in your next quote to us."
I learned a lot from this single contract. In my working life I think I have been fair to my customers and suppliers: good business is good for both sides.
A shame the protagonist is female, or else they could have been Regomi s ed as Bill...
Matilda ...
... is that you?
I saw similar a couple times in that timeframe ...
... although it started in roughly the late 70s with BBSes, and by '91 it was already getting quite rare. Usually, the kid was in their early teens.
"To this day, I have no idea how that phone bill got paid, or what the next bill looked like,"
The bill was always forgiven by $TELCO, they actually had a code that nullified the charges as a one-off "computer mistake". In reality, they COULD have forced payment from the adult(s) who gave access to the child. Remember, by law a child isn't allowed to enter into a contract, and as such they can not be held liable ... but the adult who leased/rented the line was responsible for whatever happened on it.
The next bill almost always was smaller than it would have been historically, because word circulated about the huge bill and everybody stopped making off-campus calls for a bit. Gradually, though, the siren call of having a pizza ready for you to pick up on the way home beckoned, and the numbers climbed back to wherever they had been previously.
During the meanwhile, in the US anyway, local calls had started to became free, and as of 30 years or so ago it didn't matter anymore.
Remarkable !
" I am ashamed to admit that I still have not mastered the patience and restraint that the librarian demonstrated under pressure that day. "
" But I am working on it. "
Why this remarkable person isn't the President is unfortunately not incomprehensible but remains an excellent if rhetorical question.
Re: Remarkable !
"Why this remarkable person isn't the President"
Because they are not fucking stupid, nor a congenital liar, which are currently prerequisites for the job.
Today..
Today your bug can run up a $100,000 or more AWS bill. Somewhere in between these time periods was a golden age where the internet was free and stuff ran on your own computers.
Re: Today..
But ... hang on a sec. The Internet is free, and all my stuff is running on my own computers.
Are you suggesting I'm doing it wrong?
(In South Africa....) Way before ADSL was a thing (and Diginet was still a slow, expensive and cumbersome beast) we needed to transmit data files from site to headoffice on a regular basis.
The line was not consistently good, so it would cause the batch plus a couple of newer batches to bog down and hog the line (causing a bit of a serious telephone bill), at which point a babysitting marathon would ensue just to ensure the data is transmitted. And it was a real pain in the arse.
Then iBurst (remember we used to call them iBurps :) ) was introduced, and it was way better than Telkom's fragile dial-up line... so we got an iBurst modem and all that, and thereafter had no more issues with file deliveries. At least iBurps was not hardcapped, but throttled down once you hit your 3Gb data cap.
In the late 70s/early 80s we would often transfer builds of BSD from Berkeley to Stanford via motorbike.
The latency sucked, but the bandwidth was phenomenal in the era of Switched56.
BARRnet helped with that particular problem in the mid-80s ... but I still remember volunteers sneaker-netting newly built BSD tapes from Berkeley to other Unis here in the Bay Area, and beyond, in the late '80s and early '90s.
Sounds familiar
" mostly involved helping the librarian to dust shelves and replace books. She did those jobs so well, ,"
... that now she is the ruler of the Queen's Navee.