The Regomiser seems to be missing a few tricks these days. Surely the IT guy's real name was Ben D Cable........

Or perhaps Mr. Ben Twire, Ben DeBit, or the ever popular Mister Ben Dover?

*Ducks & runs for safety*

Ben There, Dan That...

Once went to a club with a mate in sunny Bognor Regis.

We were stopped on the door by a bouncer who looked at us, and said 'Sorry lads, if yer name ain't daaaan, you ain't comin' in'

My mate said 'My name *is* Dan'... and we got in.

I used to work with someone who was called Eileen Dover.

Went to school with a Theresa Green! And even more cruel, a Wayne Kerr!

And the Ex went to school with a Gordon Bennett!

I encountered a executive (Very very big office*)with the name Debbie Discipline at a certain 3 letter pharma facility.

*I said Office not oriface - Ohh never mind here's Paris.

There was a Sherry Trifle at the first place I worked.

Also, Mrs Mouse had an aged aunt called Ida Payne.

I used to work with a woman by the name of Rain. She married a man with the surname Day. Everyone meet Rain Day... I never did have the courage to ask her if middle name started with E...

Twenty years ago there was a senior member of staff (so they had their own office with their name on the door) at Kings Lyn hospital by the name of " Cherry Pye ".

Apparently that was her married name too!

And the Ex went to school with a Gordon Bennett!

Presumably not *that* [1]Gordon Bennett though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gordon_Bennett_Jr.

In Bedfordshire?... I think my wife went there.

Gordon Bennett was the permanent manager at my student union, back in the day.

And a contract manager at a former employer's client was called Michael Hunt (no-one was allowed to call him Mike).

About 15 yrs ago, my sister worked with a guy with the surname of "Flay." He then married a lovely lady with the first name of Susan.

I kid you not. I didn't believe the story until I met them at the company fête.

And no, I resisted the temptation to talk about it. Just.

A policewoman friend called Ann Jones married a Mr Cuff to get 'Ann Cuff the WPC'.

My mother said she had a friendly bank manger called Mr Owen. As in "Owen the bank manager'

No way a director would've moved their own desk, they'd have their local PA/grad student/similar minion do it.

Back when I worked at the local college (now University), 35 years or so ago, we were transitioning from terminals to PCs and at the time there was no common network standard.

We had rooms full of Acorn machines using their version of Cheapernet which were fine, except the little sh1ts quickly discovered that you could undo the T-piece just enough to make the network flaky without it being immediately obvious which machine was impacted. Our networking guy was forever having to go round the classrooms tightening them.

We then had one department purchase a network of IBM PS/2s, model 30 workstations and a model 60 server with minimal consultation. They then expected us to install and commission it with almost no information. We eventually worked out the network config and our ops guys installed the cabling, stapling it to the desks so tightly that any movement on the computers would rip the wires from the connectors!

Our T-connectors were double shrink wrapped to help deter tampering and accidental disconnections. Seemed to work quite well, doesn't stop anyone really intent on damage though, but then they could just cut the cable, you just can't prevent everything.

Worked in a customer service call centre as a student, with all the pcs and phone on coax... each row of desks on a spur. We worked out if the guy next to the window wiggled his foot in just the right place on a particular floor tile, it would cause just enough of a disconnect and reconnect to reset the 'time since last incoming call' counter for our row... pushing us back to the end of the next available operator queue, and telling the manager's monitoring system that we had just finished a call.

worked great until the manager decided she wanted the window seat.

Shortly after our firm had started giving people the sort of desks that can be used either whilst sitting or standing, I was visiting a colleague in another office. He had the desk standing and was pointing out some things on the screen to me, when I heard a light clunk. I looked around but couldnt see what was causing it. When a minute later I heard it again, I casually mentioned that the noise must be annoying if its happening regularly. He shrugged and said it only happened when he had the desk standing and it didnt really bother him.

After a moment I stooped slightly and looked under the standing desk and saw his computer case was dangling from the monitor cable and slowly swinging around on said cable. The clunking was when it occasionally banged softly against one of the legs of the desk. I pointed out to him that the computer shouldnt be airborne like that and he was just asking for it to destroy his computer and/or his monitor, when it eventually decided to start obeying gravity.

He grumpily replied what was the point of having a standing desk if he couldnt use it that way. I simply advised him to ask IT for a longer monitor cable. Whatever the case I was extremely impressed by the strength of the Cable and the fact that its connectors hadnt ripped out of their Sockets under the weight of the whole case. Must have been some good quality cable...

Very recently, I know of someone raising their adjustable desk and as it rose past the wall socket with a PSU plugged in to it, it ripped the socket out of the wall!

In the 1980's I heard the story about someone who wanted to get some more big (6ft high 4 ft square) physical mainframe disks into the machine room, but there was not quite enough space on the floor.

If they moved those disks 6 inches they could get the new ones in. So while the disks were in use (!) they leant back against the disk, and pushed ( with their legs as they had been taught) but could not budge it.

Unfortunately, one of the guy's trouser belt caught in the Emergency Power off. So when he stood up, the EPO was pullled and the whole bank of DASD lost power.

This took down the whole banking system - whoops.

That must have made for an interesting incident report.

Once had an office full of nice ladies, they decided to rearrange their office due to a new colleague starting. They all had VOIP phones at their desk... and desktop computers connected to our friend RJ45... Due to the cool new building, our glass office could look into their glass office. We watched in horror as they unplugged everything, stacked it in the corner and proceeded to move desks and storage cabinets, sans help from Facilities team. This went on for a day or two while were were in the middle of a complete switch swap of the entire network. We had our work cut out for us when the plugged in their VOIP Phones and computers into the wrong VLANS... Not to mention, they needed many longer cables to accommodate their new layout, what a drama! As George T says "Oh My!"

There is no limit to the mayhem well-intentioned clueless people can cause.

Just be happy they didn't include potted plants on the desktop cases.

I used to do the H&S inspections at a previous employer.

One thing I had noticed was that the cables under the desks kept being rearranged out of the cable trays and onto the floor. These were 4 desk units where the employees faced into the centre and there were no privacy boards under the desks, just their drawer units and the cable trays. The thought was that someone might we using the cable tray to rest their feet on and accidentally pulling the cables - the H&S concern was entanglement, rather than trip, etc.

A plan was hatched that I should do the inspection whilst people were in the office rather than before everyone came in. And then a very fast realisation that you cannot tell four young ladies in shorts skirts that they should not move their feet while you are going to look around under their desks!

I've said this one before, but worth a repeat...

The lady that used to vigorously rub her nether regions, with the heel of her foot while giving out train timetable information.

For some reason I always changed out the PC's on her current hot desk cluster, when she was on shift.

As it was called, was indeed a horrific protocol.

Many moons ago, our boss was adamant the whole team (10 dudes) would go to lunch together. Statistically, this is impossible as you'll always end up with one blocking all others and still "doing something quick".

How to solve this ? Easy, you have 10 base 2 network: he'd just unplug his workstation cable, causing all NFS mounted workstations to insta-freeze !

Everyone would be forced to go lunch, LOL.

There's another solution : you and anyone who is ready go for lunch.

Whoever needs to work more assumes the responsability and doesn't keep everyone else from having lunch.

It's called being adult.

Interesting that you've interpreted that anecdote as indicating the problem lies with the random colleague who had one last thing to do, and not with the control freak of a boss mandating when and with whom their underlings took their lunch break...

For me the solution would have been to find somewhere else to work where the boss wasn't a complete arsehole, but that's just me and my intense dislike of being forced into regularly occurring (perhaps even daily, by the sounds of it here) artificially constructed work-related social scenarios in MY time just because someone in the team thinks it's a jolly good idea.

I managed a factory back in the day. When our new MRP/MPS boxes went in the installer left a huge coil of cable in the corner of the warehouse for a yet to be commissioned office on the other side of the wall.

Super, until the entire warehouse fell off the network. Seems the terminator had failed.

But that will happen if you drop a 800kg pallet of stuff on it. Took half a day to figure out where the terminator was.

Learning points from this were, one tell someone what you've done and two, don't put the coil of cable and terminator on the warehouse floor.

Years ago, a colleague and I were fitting some cables for some experimental kit on board one of the UK Royal Navy's finest. The cables contained something like 25 twisted pairs, all individually screened and armoured too for durability. The multi pole connectors were works of industrial art in themselves. All we had to do was run the cables from A to B and plug them in. They were the sort of cables that went where they wanted to rather than where you wanted, you had to work with them not against them.

After much effort we finally got the plug in the right place at the right angle to meet the socket on the big cabinet of important stuff that was on and running. We were assured by our host that that it was fine to connect them whilst the kit was on, and also it was really inconvenient to turn it off anyway because of all the downstream issues that would create.

The main power switch to the cabinet was at the top, on the front, right next to where our cables came out and right next to the socket we were aiming for. The only protection on the very unassuming toggle switch was a small guard either side and a note saying "do not turn off". At this point, my colleague says "was that on just now? Err, I think I better go and get Bob (our host)". I spent a few minutes in mild panic thinking "we're in trouble here" before Bob comes back, looks at the switch and says "yeah that should be on". He flicks it on and calmly walks off leaving us very relieved and breathing easier.

The rest of the fit went well and the kit did great service for a while until an unfortunate incident outside of our control meant that the kit was no more. But that's the deal sometimes.

I wonder how many of you are old enough to have come across the old single UTP network cables?

I lost count of the times we had to patch them up after being "extended" with random bits of mains flex after a some PHB decided it was time to move the long-suffering drones about à la Chinese Tiles. The cables would work, mostly, but everything would go to pot if someone dare use a vacuum cleaner or power tool within a half-mile radius!

And yes, I'm looking at you, "Keith." The once loathed ex-overlord of our 6 drawing offices!

I miss messing with that old Sperry mainframe.

I remember working on a project in a large hospital in Bedfordshire back in around 1987. Had a 10Base5 DECnet network connecting a MicroVax to Terminal Servers thence to VT320 terminals. Part of the network ran through a cleaning cupboard. One day the whole network was down, and we discovered the cable neatly snipped to remove about a foot and a half. Probably just enough for a new radio aerial for their car!! Data leaking all over the floor. The fun we had.

2 tales from my past come to mind:

1st is thinnet related - a company that made lorry trailers kept having weird issues. I traced the cable though the building and the yard, and over time, narrowed it down to one office. I discovered the 10base2 cable running from one side of the prefab office to the other via a step up into the end office. Also running there were the heating pipes. The system would work fine till the heating came on, and as the cables heated up, the resistance would change just enough to unbalance the entire segment.

The solution: when the heating came on, we would remove the terminator from the network, and connect it one office down the cable, cutting one office off, but keeping everything else working. The PC in there would be moved, and 5 or so months later, we would reverse it all for the months the heating was not in use.

The 2nd is from when we did some cabling in a primary school to give them their first network and internet. All the pupil's PCs (all 4) were in an alcove with the ISDN connection. One utp cable ran from this all the way to the office to give the admin computer internet access. 3 weeks after we fitted it, the admin PC stopped having access to the internet. We were told how it was all our fault, how terrible our product/install was. I was sent to the school, all seemed fine, but not connection.

I walked the corridor back to the ISDN end, and half way stopped. I pointed out to the staff I was dealing with that if you have a plumber in to work on your heated, and they blowtorch the cable running along the wall, it will take more then a lick of paint to cover up what has happened, and therefore it wasn't our work that was at fault.

Apart from the ones with dubious confectionary.....

I had a office move from one building to another at the pharma facility I was based at for one lady, I'm not in the frame of mind to do office moves first thing in the morning so I did it in the twilight hours between 5 - 6pm, tested all was well & there could be no possible complaint - Right!

Wrong - I stroll into work next morning, I'm not even at my desk logging on, colleague calls "Go sort your (A few expletives followed which embarrassed even my ears) female user out in 225, shes been onto the helpless desk & onto me every minutes since7.30am.

Naturally I was in a hungover state of some confusion at this, so duelly made my way there to discover she had dragged every heavy desk & overhead cabinet (Nooks they are called in Canadaland) to a new (Fen shui) arrangement, without the help of the relatively agile facilities guys.

Her obvious screams & howls of its about time & it's not working, were quickly nipped in the bud with it was working last night when I left, before your impromptu re-organize & plugging into a obviously dead network port, a 10 second walk to the patching closet was enough to get her operational in seconds.

Almost as bad as asked to enable some network ports & helpfully providing the port number & closing the ticket at 17.50, to find it angrily reopened on arrival the next day as the "Work wasn't completed, nor were they consulted" as well as a update they wanted completely different ports in a different room on a different floor enabled for their meeting that was 45 minutes prior to my normal start time, it wasn't my normal supported building so the angry screams in the call notes resulted in priorities downgraded to lower than whale shit, with notes to the effect of the work was completed as originally requested, not to some whim at 7.30am.

Or the manager:

Who deemed due to the number of wall mounted network ports he could cram more users in as we had plenty of capacity to spare & why would he need to pay for a new switch out of his budget (Until I showed him the state of the patching closet - He then rethought his plans).

E-mailed me about upcoming moves, but didn't actually put the project paperwork in or log a ticket & only woke up enough to ask "Just heard you are holiday next week, whose doing the moves". To which he was advised that the courtesy was nice, but he still needed to book this in as a project (As I advised him at the time). We needed 5 days notice to accommodate moves & CC'd in my boss who always backed us up with managers who should have known better, especially after she recalled (She being the one that told\asked me afterwards - "Is this guy a bit of a prat!") after being at the 3 hour meeting.........

Where he sat through a lengthy planning of inter department moves across three buildings & when all was signed & agreed, piped up with "What about my department!"

We had a hybrid network where the backbone was 10base2 (cheapernet) that connected buildings (portacabins & buildings) as well as a number of Perle terminal servers that connected to the 10base2 network and allowed ICL green screen dumb terminals to access an ICL DRS6000 over 10baseT medium. Next to the ICL DRS6000 I had an ISL MX95 (I think the model is correct) that ran Novell Netware 3.11 for file & print services, Novell was the product of choice back then and in my mind was always far superior to NT/Win SVR, it was the case that Microsoft had the larger development & marketing budget!

The issues I had with cheapernet were mainly due to some GIT (a person and not the platform) working on an early AutoCAD 12 machine in the last office on the site and his tendency to unscrew the 50 ohm terminal resistor that instantly dropped the network as well as sending the dumb terminals into a locked state resulting in our Progress RDBMS requiring manual intervention to terminate locked database sessions! One twist of the resistor resulting in hours of work! After repeated events including finding the resistor at the other end one day in an ashtray I took action, the resolve the issue I placed both the PC's (each end) into lockable steel computer safes that were bolted down to the floor - that sorted it!

The other issue around cheapernet that repeatedly happened was the movement of portacabins, given half our buildings were at the time temporary the company would constantly move them around the site for whatever reason, this usually took place on a Saturday and to combat this we booked Monday's off at the whiff of a suggestion regarding any move of the offices, added to this we inflated the cost of cheapernet cable and connectors to expensivenet which resulted in us having the latest, greatest gear in IT, the message finally got through though our eventual move to 10baseT throughout cut the "gaming" budget.

Those were the days :-)

Dan Gleeballs

My "smart" TV once got moved and the ethernet connector pulled out. Oddly, the cable and plug survived, but the latch on the socket broke and so any cable now has to be taped to the back panel to stay in.

Having said that, it is now a moot point as the TV is now "old" and the functionality I used (iPlayer) has now ceased due to a lack of updates.