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[1]http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/molly-guard.html

[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/molly-guard.html

Hands up all those who just had to look at the next definition :-)

@Cosy. It turns out that engineers are not a fungible resource!

They used to make binders that you could use to bind a large printout into a plastic folder with, which simply secured via the holes in the perforation strip on either side of the paper. A great idea until you employ an idiot who carefully spent several hours removing all the perforated strips: and that only gets worse when 1 year later security want to see access logs and you have to dig out the unbound printouts.

I enjoy these stories, and don't mind which day of the week they come out, but in this case it feels more like a Who Me? because it was taking his son which was the story, not really the printer...

However, if nobody ever noticed the message on the printer then it's really not a Who Me? in the strictest sense either.

Anyway, happy Friday and I'm sure the HP engineers were expecting the eject button to get press for a whole variety of unexpected reasons :-)

When HP engineers were actually engineers!

Yes they were. I also gather that engineer who designed the disk controller in question had children with quick fingers.

Oh man I really miss the touch and feel of well designed old computer hardware*. Like HP and many others. And also the honest utilitarian looks that came with the design. Plastics were real plastics some 30+ years ago! I never got much exposure to proper mainframes, tough. Those machines must have been really something to work with.

*Applies to other HW too, like power tools and home appliances. You only get that feel with professional tools nowadays (if you are lucky).

Well-designed anything is hard to come by.

Take my kids' water guns. The plastic isn't bad, and the pneumatic pumper is okay (only shoots when pumping; no pressure storage), but it's going to be used around water -- they couldn't pony up less than $5 more per gun for stainless screws? Probably more like $1-2 since they'd be buying in massive bulk.

Or here's another: like any pool filter system, mine has a backwash/drain line, but a portion of it was discharge-grade "hose" in the middle of two sections of schedule 40 PVC. This stuff is thin, a little TOO flexible, and is meant for temporary drain-the-pool use only because leaving it outside year-round will make it brittle. Last summer (my first summer owning this house/pool) it had enough and split a seam during a backwash sending a gush of water all over the landscaping. I replaced it with thick UV-stabilized vinyl with embedded fiberglass braid (and new stainless clamps also) -- there's no way it will burst under such a low pressure. And yet my 2 feet of the "good stuff" probably cost less than the entire roll of the thin crap which I found in the garage attic. I can imagine the original idea was to cut a new piece of the roll and replace this "weak link" every year, but obviously no one did.

Well-designed anything is hard to come by

I think it's partly a cultural thing.

Go back a generation or two and the expectation was that you'd pay good money and things would last (and be repairable). As I say, a cultural thing - few would consider or tolerate the disposable culture we seem to have now.

Roll forward and expectations have changed - possibly in a positive feedback loop. Mass production has lowered prices, and living standards have risen, making more "stuff" available to more people. Along with those lowering prices, the relative cost of repair vs replacement has changed - making it more economic to simply replace rather than repair. So expectations have changed, and that's fed back into the supply side - making things cheaper and less repairable.

If you think about it, from the supply side, the question becomes : why invest more in making a more expensive but repairable product when that means selling less of them due to the higher cost ? And so you end up in a race to the bottom of the pond.

And of course, a whole generation brought up to think about "price" rather than "value" feeding the supply side of that.

agreed, about 15 years ago we bought a expensive siemens washing machine, came with a 10 year warranty (it lasted about 12 years) and had proper plastic, proper good solid feel to it. When it died after 12 years we replaced it with a new equivalent model, no where near the same build quality or plastic used, feels really flimsy!

In the early nineties the place I was working was a Sun shop - SPARCStations on desktops throughout (it's been downhill ever since!). We had an HP-UX workstation in for evaluation and for some reason it was running on someone's desk with the lid off, with most of the team gathered around it. One of the senior (software) engineers wandered over, said "what does this do?" and pulled something (graphics card?) out of the heart of the electrickery. The screen went black and everyone's faces went grey. Some brave soul turned the power off, reseated the card, turned the power back on and it all worked perfectly!

At least one of these to the HP engineers of yesteryear! -->

I remember the fear first time I hotplugged a pcie graphics card, long ago enough that it working was more an aspiration than expectation. Spending extra on a high end mboard paid off that day.

...every day on my way into work at a large London museum, as I went through the tradesman's passage, I used to walk past a large grey button that had a laminated A4 sign next to it saying "DO NOT PRESS". To this day, I wish I'd tried it.

Poor tradesman, must have been rather sore... fnarr fnarr....

Probably a bell push that summoned a porter (or similar).

Summoning a porter (or similar), without the usual protective spells in place, can be deeply unpleasant - especially when they appear holding a mug of fresh tea and half a sandwich.

"What now? ... You wondered what it did? ... FFS I'd just finally got sat down for my sodding snap. Can't you bastards read?"

There was also a big red light high on the tea room wall that had a hand-scrawled A4 sign next to it that read, "WHEN RED LIGHT FLASHES REMOVE TROUSER" [sic]. I never saw it come on, which is probably for the best.

I remember the lecture hall with the switch marked "gravity on / off".

"... as I went through the tradesman's passage ..."?

You are Julian Clary and I claim my quintuple entendre.

Should have been programmed with the H2G2 approved message - see title.

If only the designers of the ICL EDS 60 had adopted this approach. More than one errant finger, elbow or buttock caused an inadvertently airborne disc pack.

To be fair that was a 1900 series device whose design dates back to the 70's. The later 2900 series VME mainframes did behave better.

Not work related, but my friend used to come over to play games on my PC. His son came with him one day, and decided pushing the 'off' button while his dad was in the middle of the game would be a fun thing to do. More than once.

Fun times!

Not only did I put tape over the needlessly bright power LED on my "current" (Trigger's Broom) PC, but after the first "shiny-must-press" incident I disabled the power button in the BIOS.

Worse then kids: the type of client (PHB?) who believes they know lots in IT but in fact are clueless monsters of destruction. They will not leave with a "simple" disk crash but can inflict truly great system borkage. They happily make use of direct database access and cleverly manipulate some field deep down without any idea of its implication or consideration for consistency.

But what do I know - I left that life many moons ago and it _must_ have change for much better since.

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. Only to become red-faced when I casually reached out[0] and toggled a loopback switch, thus fixing the link. Seems bosses in general can't resist flipping switches ... and can't read blinkenlights.

[0] When was the last time you saw "reached out" used properly?

Should give an additional thumb up for [0]!

At least, one of my (internal) clients back then would happily confess that he did something and usually was able to point roughly in the right direction. This didn't help much to fix the issue since I would also thoroughly check if he borked something else as well which he wasn't aware of but it went a long way for having a very pleasant relationship with him.

“Should give an additional thumb up for [0]!“

Absolutely. In fact, I’d make it triple. One extra for indexing and one more for contents of the footnote.

[0] is an excellent question.

I believe the last time was during a heated discussion with Human Remains when an agitated colleague informed the HR droid that if they said, "reach out", once more that they would reach out and give them a "touching point" that would probably raise a weal.

Usually I do not condone violence. But would happily make an exception there.

"reach out" that's up there with "moving forward" in annoying terms people now seem to say all the fecking time!

Using 'Reached out' instead of contacted makes me boil but not as much as any text or chat that has lol in nearly every line.

Signed; A curmudgeon.

PS Have a beer.

HA This! Had a clients IT manager come into our DC as we co-hosted DR kit for several of our clients. We were patching their kit and he was observing. As he was a bit bored and it wasn't exactly a hospitality suite he sat down on a half height IBM Sequent box and managed to flip the big, red, 1/0 power switch on the front as he did so. The only saving grace was the kit was actually another bit of theirs - their DEV backup. A selection of pints were purchased to ensure that this story remained unretold...oops.

I believe CERN has a big red button in their visitor centre with a notice inviting visitors to press it and "get it out of their system", before entering the rest of the complex.

We were adding some contactors to an installation at AWRE, Aldermaston, and the site security officer detailed to babysit us said that on no account were we to touch the electrical incomer master switch. When we asked why, because we did not relish connecting our kit up to live busbars, he explained that there was a reactor on the other end of it. So? That's just a big coil of wire, with maybe an iron core, isn't it?. NO! This reactor was a Nuclear Reactor. Any interruption to its control supply could have resulted in "Goodbye Basingstoke".

i pressed the equivalent of that switch whilst at college! I was doing a BTEC in engineering at the time late 80s. Anyway me and a few mates had to go to the colleges main intake room and sketch and label what we saw in there, what could possibly go wrong!?

So I came across the main breaker, I knew what it was, it was an old school one with the chuffing big handle that looked like a one arm bandit, I knew not to touch. But on the side of it was a small flapper type switch which just screamed touch me, so I did. CHUNK all the power went off! It was the breakers test switch! Lecturers came flying out of lectures wondering what's happened, it took a good 5mins to get everything back on and the college bell remained 5mins late for the rest of the term! We were all good mates so said that my A4 leaver arch binder knocked the button!

I was playing a game, and my son hit the power button on the Winbox, and poof... the game never worked right again.

I've never heard it called "z-fold" paper. We used to call it "fan fold" paper down here in Australia. That's fan as in geisha, not fan as in hitting.

Same here (UK). Oh the memories of miles and miles of green and white striped paper...

/shudders

An SF story, with the title "Beware the tiny hand".

Hmmm. Actually I can't remember the story either - must be getting ol middle aged.

If one of my team was working out of hours and had childcare issues I would go in the officer ad offer a childsitting service

A tier 5 data centre belonging to a former employer of mine holds an annual families day, which does include tours of the halls, specifically targeted at the kids.

In the years I've known of it, they've actually had no incidents. But I haven't taken the tour..

For others with the same question, I already did the Googling:

The reproduction number, or "R" number, is the average number of cases of infection generated by one infected person. If >1, the number of people with the disease (COVID-19, in this case) increases - the pandemic gets worse. The author is effectively saying "is it safe to go to the park?"

(Note: Westpondian here, and haven't heard the term before despite reading quite a bit of news over the last couple months. Could just be it's more common on the east side of the pond.)

I once took my daughter (now 30 with a son of her own about the age she was then) into work. My wife and I were having a drink in the work cafeteria, while various colleagues went "Oooh" and "AAh" over the cute little toddler. Anyway, she was being well-behaved (for once!) and we didn't worry when she waddled off - until she marched straight up to the Director of the Institute, and said, loud and clear, "Daddy!". Fortunately, the Director and I had known each other for a long time and had done fieldwork together so, after an initial moment of looking totally nonplussed, he took it in good heart!