I was PA to a senior manager who, in a moment of clarity, sent an email to all of his managers saying "this project is a mess - and this is what we are going to do about it". He came round to me about 10 minutes later saying he should not have sent it... can I go and delete it as it should have said "DO NOT PASS ON". I went to the IT department with a list of managers, and we started to delete the email from manager's in boxes.

A little while later someone found me and told me to stop what I was doing. Some of the managers had already sent it on to their staff.

Instead of being a disaster, the general feeling was it was a good email, it was good to hear that the senior manager had the same view as the troops. The senior manager ended up by getting lots of kudos.

There was this BOFH episode with terms like "fire it up" or "give it a bash"...

Hm. Now I need to go through the archives again and waste some time. Though I believe that this should count as professional development...

What was your username now again?

a-hup-yup, BOFH withdrawal symptoms due to lack of a regular BOFH diet.

Not so much destroy as waste hundreds of boxes of fan-fold paper.....

This was back at my first job involving mainframes. Came in on night shift and read through the shift handover as usual. One special job to be run - a complete dump of the stock. It finished within an hour or so of the start of the shift, and started to print. And print. And print. We had a crappy shift as we were undermanned, and the printer wouldn't fold the paper correctly. We went through nearly the entire stock of paper we had (and that was a LOT of paper).

When the boss turns up in the morning he has a fit. Why did we print this all off? There was a note in the shift handover to NOT print it off. I argued, grabbed the shift handover log and showed him. No message. Until we turned back a couple of pages and found someone had made a mistake, crossed off the section including that day's instructions, copied it all to the a new page where they FORGOT to add the one particular line that said not to print this job's output.

I still miss those days.

I'm guessing that the New Year came with an updated procedure concerning the printing and manipulation of the end-of-year share certificates.

I'm also guessing that reprinting was not an option for some asinine accounting reason. I can reprint my invoices as often as I like, they don't change number, they don't change total and printing does not impact my customers' accounts.

But hey, this is the 21st century, so . . .

Accounting is obviously magic so for some arcane reason only the first printing works for use in the blood sacrifices!

I always wonder what went wrong in the upbringing of a person who decide to become an accountant...

Share certificates are a record of ownership. To prevent some nefarious individual running off handfuls of of them and so enriching themselves on the sly, there would most likely have been some barrier to a simple reprint. If nothing else, the bank would have needed to keep the original, damaged version for a period of time as proof the 'replacement' was, indeed, a replacement and not a get-rich-quick scheme!

Does make me wonder what would happen if the printer ran out of ink, or the paper jammed, or any of the multitude of other ways a print can fail.

But I can definitely understand the 'must be unique' nature of such things.

They would have been legal documents (with the status of promissory notes) and each had to be unique. The ability to print duplicates would have easily led to fraud and control should be second only to printing banknotes (which, as many people don't realise, are also promissory notes).

(At the danger of opening the can of worms...)

(which, as many people don't realise, are also promissory notes)

This depends on the jurisdiction and issurer.

Eg. Scottish banknotes are promissory notes (which is part of why they are not legal tender[1] anywhere), whereas Bank of England banknotes are not (and are legal tender outside Scotland[2]).

[1] This has little practical meaning, "legal tender" is only meaningful in some narrow classes of debt payment.

[2] There are no bank notes that are legal tender in Scotland.

If my experience in a similar job is anything to go by:

They would have been printed on special (probably numbered) stock.

Just enough stock would have been produced to cover the run of share certificates, plus a small amount for "spoils".

The numbers on "spoils" and unused stock would have been carefully noted and cancelled once the print job was complete.

The same goes for things like cheque stock with pre-printed cheque numbers (in magnetic toner), where the recipient and amount are printed onto the stock.

So, for example, if there were 2,000 certificates to print, then there might have been 2,500 in the stock, you'd waste a couple at the front loading and aligning the printer, running off proofs, paper jams, etc. and expect to have a good number left over.

Of course, when I was working in a similar industry the best part of 20 years ago, we had reel-fed printers that used rolls of stock that weighed about a tonne each and fed through the printer at 440 feet per minute. Make sure you'd tucked your tie in first before running off those proofs (yes they did still make us wear ties, in the 21st century).

Posted anon, because this contains way too much info that could identify me...

I did an audit of a place which processed very sensitive information. The ultra, company critical stuff which, if released to unauthorised parties could bring the company to its knees. And as this was a small country, bring down the government as well.

The computers were all in secure areas. The code was well protected. Password were secure and changed regularly, with decent password policy and no password reuse. The users were in a separate, locked room, with key card access. They even needed their key cards to access their terminals, so going to the loo meant that their screen automatically locked. It all looked great.

Until I went through the control points for a typical job run. The run was securely started. It was properly audited. The processingwas done and saved in secure file sets, and then the results were printed for examination.

Me: "And where do the printouts go"

Senior Operator: "Oh, we put an elastic band around the line printer output and put it in the pidgeon holes outside the print room."

Me: "You mean the open area, in the corridor, where people walk past all the time?"

Senior Operator: "Oh, yes, I can see there is a problem here!"

Next week they ordered a new printer for the secure room!

007 was already there.

For some reason an accounting process spooled the ear end accounts direct to the printer rather than producing a file which could be reprinted. The customer had run the process but the print file stubbornly remained in the mainframe print queue, This was a standard support call, the fix was to crash the output scheduler then restart it, nothing else would get it out of the system. Having made sure that the Printer was off-line I did exactly that, as expected the job disappeared from the print queue, but never re-appeared. Very soon I have a Finance director screaming down the phone at me while I'm trying to talk them through some diagnostic processes. Sure enough the print had reappeared in a queue but for a printer in a remote office which had been installed since the previous year end. It turned out that they were not issuing year end prints to particular locations and it had been pure luck that the first attempt had found the central printer. I offered to suspend the job and transfer it back tot he central printer but they were so freaked out they would rather wait until it printed off then have it couriered to them. The key issue was that the remote printer was going to take about 12 hours to print off the reports and it would then need to be driven over 150 miles to return it 'home'

Only once, when "Get in here!' really meant "Get OUT!" Like a slow motion train wreck, can't stop, can't turn away. Only having my coat as a personal belonging, it made for a quick and easy exodus! And yes, this was some time ago, back in the mid 80s.

It was nice of "Jock" to share the story with us

Hopefully he's now able to take stock of the situation...