That sounds pretty sweet, as you'd expect from Tate and Lyle...

As the Americans are wont to say "It was the bomb"

"All your base are belong to us"

"You can't go into that room until the atomised chicken dust has settled!"

The glass window from the control room where I was, through to "that room", had a windscreen wiper on it, and although they might have been exaggerating with the word "atomised", there was no way I was going into "that room".

It was in a facility that performed R&D for the aerospace sector. I can't say more because ==>

If they were shooting chickens into aircraft engines to simulate bird strikes, I hope they thawed the chicken first!!

It froze just before hitting the blades.

"I hope they thawed the chicken first!!"

This is probably apocryphal:

A few decades ago the folk working on high speed trains decided they needed to test the windscreen for resistance against bird strikes. So, taking inspiration from aerospace, they fired chickens at it, which always shattered the windscreen, however strong it was. Finally they asked their aerospace colleagues for advice and were told "Thaw the chicken first."

A good weekend to all Commentards -->

I can't remember the exact details now, but there was a time when some legal bods decided our team couldn't access the data we needed, so we were twiddling our thumbs for a few days before it got sorted. I'm pretty sure that there will be a vast number of IT pros working with financial or government customers who have similair stories.

The other issue I came across but didn't impact me directly was location-based. Due to some legal minutiae, offshore team members from certain countries were not allowed to work in our base country at all, and to be on the safe side, our legal team banned them from coming to the office. So when we had our onsite team meetings, they would travel as tourists and we had our 'team days' at the nearest pub.

But I did spot an ancient HP-1000 mini-computer from 1977 or so chugging away processing data from the Westerbork Radio Synthesis Telescope (at one time one of the largest radio telescopes in the world) in 1996. It basically had been chugging away since the commissioning of the telescope. By the time of my visit they had set up a Linux PC to process the same data, and wanted it running 24/7 for a year before considering decommissioning the HP-1000. Some old boxes are very hard to kill.

That's reminded me of a piece of inspection equipment my Dad "inherited" for his department when another factory closed down. It was a quite revolutionary, for it's time, 3D measuring system driven by a PDP-8! This would be in around 1990, I can't remember the specific model so I'm not sure how old it was but apparently an engineer almost fell about laughing when he saw it.

Way back in the mid 80s our DEC support contract was, IIRC, a 4 hour response (might even have been 2 hours) during office hours but once on-site the engineer would continue until fixed.

About 19:00 one evening, and waiting for the relevant part, there was a distant sound of thunder so the engineer decreed that the risk of a lightning strike was too high to continue, and that he'd return the next day! I didn't really blame him, it wasn't critical to get the system back up that night and I wanted to get home as well.

A colleague and I were working at a large bank in the US. We had been given a temporary (paper) badge for the week. Every day we had to go in through the main entrance, speak to reception who would phone for one of our contacts to come and meet us and escort us to the secure operations area where we were working.

On Friday, we parked the car as usual, and spotted the external badge lock doors were open, so we went in, up in the lift to our floor. The cleaner was in cleaning the secure area, with the power cables keeping the door open.

We said "hello" to the cleaning lady, sat down and started working.

Half an hour later the manger came past and said "hi... how did you get in here?" (as we were meant to be escorted every where).

We explained and he said "Ahh we had a power blip on the exterior doors - and they default to open for the first 30 seconds until they connect to the controller." He also fixed the cleaner's problem, by giving them their own power socket in the secure area, and some education.

I was involved in world wide games event. One day was "disaster day" when disruptive activities were planned, such as dropping power to one site, unplugging the network, a team is down with food poisoning. I had nothing to do - just be on call.

As I got out of bed that morning, I pulled a muscle in my back ( too long spent bending over low tables), and phoned in on the medical emergency number.

I lay on the floor of my hotel room as this was the place of least pain. After an hour I phone in again, saying I needed to go to the bathroom, could not get up, and was going to wet myself.

5 minutes later there was a knock at my hotel room door - "come in" I said... the person went away and came back with a master key.

There was a doctor's just across the road. (Who did not speak English) and got it sorted. Taking the "patient history" was interesting. "Nephrites? " "OK", "Pulmonary?" OK etc.

After he manipulated my back, he gave me a "happy pill" which eased the pain and made me feel very happy.

A couple of days later I was talking to one of the senior organisers about the incident, and she looked very embarrassed. When I phoned in they thought I was the "medical test case", and put it low in the list of problems to be resolved. It wasn't till my second call that they realised they had a real emergency and needed to so something about it.

My dad was in the navy and during one of these exercises on an airbase was assigned to the opposing force (AKA "The Bad Guys"). As such, in the week before the official start he began hiding bundles of broom handles cut down to the size of dynamite.

After the fourth one was discovered the exercise was scrapped before it began.

"during this job Lyle noticed a very old Sperry-Unisys computer ticking away. He later learned those machines were eventually ripped out of the base … to provide parts for real live air traffic control systems that relied on the same ancient platform and had run out of spares."

During the Y2K build-up, I heard from a friend at GEC-Alsthom that some outdated Apollo workstations suffered a similar fate in the UK.

When I was considering joining the AF (of the US variety, though I did end up at a base of the R variety eventually), and going to visit the base and shop where I might be serving, my visit happened to be scheduled on a day they were doing just such wargames, unbeknownst to me (but beknownst to us). As I tended to a rather iconoclastic, gothy mode of dress back then, and still had very long hair (and was/am male), the SPs (I think they already weren't called APs, Air Police, back then) thought it just had to be some of the wargame planners taking the piss, and I found myself prone in a ditch with one or two aforementioned SPs keeping their guns on me. It didn't take too long for them to sort out that I was supposed to be there, probably only about three years, or that's what it felt like.

And as for the IT angle, it isn't clear whether Lyle was at an RAF, USAF, or other-AF base, but we were cursed with a system known as Banyan Vines, which I rather loathed. Almost put me off the whole IT thing right then & there. I'm glad I did find out it could be better, eventually. But I'll give Lyle the benefit of the doubt, and assume he wasn't personally responsible for that.