Pay attention, class: Today you’ll learn the wrong way to turn things off
- Reference: 1754897531
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/08/11/who_me/
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This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Steven”.
“One of my first jobs in the 1980s was as a training instructor at the headquarters of CAD CAM company Intergraph,” Steven wrote.
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At the time, Intergraph sold its own customized versions of long-dead hardware vendor DEC’s mighty VAX servers.
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The training system Steven showed to students lived in a cabinet alongside a tape storage system.
“I was demonstrating to wannabee Sysadmins how to power the tape drive on and off,” which is pretty innocuous,” Steven admitted. “Unfortunately, in a triumph of ergonomic design, the VAX power button and the tape power button were located right next to each other.”
[4]Tech bro denied dev's hard-earned bonus for bug that overcharged a little old lady
[5]Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server
[6]Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo
[7]Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production
You can guess what happened next: Steven flipped the switch to power down the tape drive, but switched off the server instead.
“Suddenly, all the training systems just stopped dead as I power cycled the VAX that supported all the terminals in the training centre.”
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Steven’s students had just witnessed a major mistake, but they didn’t know it and Steven decided not to tell them.
“I walked out of the machine room claiming innocence and got away with it,” he told Who, Me?
Until now!
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Have you walked away from a major mistake? If so, don’t make the mistake of not sharing your story. Instead, [10]click here to send an email to Who, Me? If your story’s a cracker, we won’t err on the side of caution. ®
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... because they knew that you wouldn't make the same mistake again. Get someone new and they'll have a learning curve to get through as well, and they might kill things at exactly the wrong moment.
Or they couldn't think of a worse punishment than keeping you working there ;-)
I probably was not the only one...
Remoted in to a server on a remote site. Was also working on a server locally.
Did a shutdown on the wrong window, was supposed to be the local server, not the remote server.
At least there was somebody on the remote site to power the server back on.
Now I doublecheck to make sure I do the correct operation on the correct server...
Nothing teaches like experience.
Same here. Mac Mini was in Switzerland.
Watched my boss type:
sudo shutdown -h now
rather than -r
After an hour, eventually found a cleaner who managed to hit the power button, restoring service :-)
Who the hell names a reboot utility "shutdown?"
That's why on my linux system, it's symlinked to
sudo reboot now
shutdown checks to see if it was executed as reboot and reboots instead of shutting down? Interesting
"eject tape" button on a 6300 VAX
I was managing a VAX 6300 in the early 90s, but of course I needed the assistance of the night-operators (who were more familiar with the as/400) to run the nightly backups.
my predecessor had built a nice interactive menu system to manage the backups in the All-in-1 system, but one particular night-op couldn't be bothered going back to his terminal to select the (next) menu item to rewind and eject the tape, and found an "eject" button near the tape unit. It was actually the "Halt" switch that did a hard reset on the machine, and as the machine booted it would rewind and eject the tape.
After a while I noted the short uptimes (less than 12 hours) were after the particular operator was on the late shift, and hung around to talk to him and ask what gives with the reboots. He didn't know, he wasn't (knowingly) rebooting the system, so I asked him to show me what he did each night. And got to the part where he would press the magic button to eject the tape.
I found the key and locked the console panel, and told him he had to use the menu on his terminal from now on.
no more mysterious crashes after that.
Worked for a large garage, where one of my roles was to stroke and fondle to PDP-11/73 that ran the franchise. One day I'm fondling away when one of the departmental manglers came to talk to me. And he decided to 'jokingly' tap the front of the PDP as if he was turning it off ....... mangling to hit the power button dead centre without even looking. His face turned red and scared ..... just as quickly as the silence descended upon us.
I told him to go, and not tell anyone about it. I restarted the PDP, and told my mangler that it had glitched.
And this is the first time that another person has learned of that incident.
It's always nice to have some decent extortion material against a departmental mangler.
Some indecent material is even better...
Wrong PC
I did once remote connect to the wrong PC and restarted it - I should have been more careful but two machines, one in our company and one at a sister company, had very similar IDs and I just connected and restarted without double checking as I knew our user was away from their desk.
It was noticed by the Dutch IT department but there was no comeback beyond a, "Don't do it again!"
And this is my major annoyance with Win11
Prior to win11, I always had my local machine's task bar at the top of the screen. Simple way to know if I am local or on a remote machine. Win11 still won't let you move the task bar to the top and MS have even blocked the registry hacks to force it. Company policy is all win11 (for desktops and laptops) so I can't even pick a diiferent OS if I wanted to. MS response on the feedback hub (where there are many many people requesting this) "We'll be continuing to evolve Windows 11 and its features based on feedback like this, so thank you so much for taking the time to give us your feedback!" - that was over a year ago.....
Day 4 of a new job.
I was asked to move some equipment below the items was the ups for the comms room with an emergency power down switch just 1 or 2 mm proud of the case, not recessed or with guards.
My knee caught the switch and dropped the power to the comms room.
Fortunately there were other people in the room at the time, and it must have been forgiven as I was still working there 20 years later.