... with cheap PCs. We had some that were really cheap (not inexpensive, there's a marked difference), bougth by our "friends" at the neighbouring institute in a year end spending frenzy. The power supply had an 11.3V rail, among other things. And three (all three that ended up in our lab) PC power supplies had the smoke seals break. One of them really went out with a bang (----> Icon), the others just fizzled.

That was after the admin left who would open each and every PC, measure those power supplies, run two days of memtest and another couple of days of disk exorcising ( keep that typo ;p) ). He was a bit of a character, but sometimes his CDO (same as OCD, but the letters are in the right order!) paid off.

I once made the magic blue smoke come from an SGI Tezro, not a cheap machine!

I never found out what happened, but it had been fed some of the UK's finest electricity before so I doubt the PSU was set incorrectly.

which needed help setting up swanky new digs in London, UK.

I think most people reading This Esteemed Organ have the intelligence to know where London is...

Yeah but no. There is a London, Texas, and you can bet that there is a number of US readers that just might be confused . . .

And there's a London in Ontario, Canada.

Our brand new corporate travel tool had a default London, of London Ontario, instead of London England. I found this out when it said the flight from London to New york was under 3 hours! This was fixed the first day.

And as the story refers to the “gray” market, then that confuses things too. But we all know that the Reg can’t spell these days

It's very vague.

Do they mean the City of London, the Greater London metropolitan area, or the Bay of London in Orkney?

At least we know it wasn't London in France, Ontario, Arkansas, Ohio...

And, of course, the City of Westminster often gets muddled up with the City of London while the Port of London has its own Authority.

And the Port of London authority stretches all the way to Teddington where the tidal Thames begins.

Perhaps they do. My question is which UK, the one in Asia or the one in South America?

The vile Americanism of placename, bigger placename is too stupid for words. The only time it might be needed is when discussing two or more places with the same name - for instance the Perth in Australia and the real one in Scotland.

There's also London, Ontario, which, given this involves a French bank, is not too out of left field (although I'd have expected them to park themselves in Montréal, rather than some speck in Ontario ;-) ).

But let's not be pedantic, Korev ;-)

30+ years ago I had to go to a customer in the US. The city council office IT department. I arrived on the Friday for a briefing before the weekend work. This had been planned for months, as it meant shutting down their whole system for the weekend to do the upgrade.

I was shown around the machine room, and the brand new tape drives, installed that day. The IT manager was very pleased, because he had replace the IBM drives with someone else's tape drives saving loads of money. We then had to go and admire his brand new, expensive car out in the car park, he had collected it that morning - what a coincidence,

Saturday morning we started work - but the tape drives didn't work - they had not actually been tested connected to the CPU! The guy I was working with phoned their help desk, and reported the problem. Great - an engineer has been dispatched. He doesn't work the weekend, so he'll be there first thing on Monday. My colleague escalated this and got told that out of hours cover was not included in the service contact. My colleague's boss was not around (this was the days before mobile phones).

We had been chatting to the IBM hardware engineer who was taking the opportunity while the system was down to fix a few things. He quietly wandered over to the tape drives did something and the tape drives suddenly were available. The drives had a misconfigured address.

I left on Monday, job done. Later I heard back from my colleague, the IT manager had been given a sweetener- a new car the day the OEM tape were installed. By the time the cost of the out of hours contact was included in the price, the tape drives cost more than IBM's. They were also not as reliable, and usually one out of the four was down.

A month later there was a new IT manager, the ex IT manager was driving around in an old car (working for someone else), there was a bank of bright blue IBM tape drives, and the IBM engineer got a bonus/thank you award.

The voltage switch is usually quite near the socket where Nikolai or his colleagues would have to plug in the mains lead. You'd think one of them might have noticed.

I have probably recounted this tale before but it is a good one and relevant.

Back in the early 2000s compaq made docking stations for laptops these things where huge (standard desktop size for the era) and could take 2 5-1/4” inch drives.

Now occasionally the ejection method for removing the laptop jammed and under the back cover on the dock was a level to manually release the catches.

To get to this lever you also exposed all the connections for the PSU - the thing used a standard desktop power supply - some of you may guess what is coming next.

A director rings up to say his laptop is stuck so we talk him through taking the back cover off (leaving power connected so the manual eject still has the power to operate. We talk him through the process to use the lever to manually eject, at which point there is a band that can be heard across our office. Followed by a rather sheepish I think that was the wrong lever.

Yes you guessed it instead of moving the white lever, he moved the one on the back of the PSU from 240 to 110v input.

Oops

Nikolai was either nor clever nor experienced enough to check the voltage switch? Hardly the bosses fault.

Been there, done that! We bought two new Disc drives for our Vaxstations (a whole Gigabyte, no less!), plugged them in and saw the magic blue smoke escaping, accompanied by appropriate sound effects! Exactly the same situation - they had been supplied set to 120V rather than 240V. Fortunately, the supplier acknowledged it was their mistake and replaced them! And while not a fly-by-night outfit, they had got the contract on the basis of being cheaper than DEC.

I remember our then supplier of computer equipment for our image processing systems installing a 80287 math co-processor for our 12 MHz 80286 PC-AT compatible machine (the faster of the two machines we were using at the time). That worked fine for a brief while, until it didn't, and I could smell something fishy (and I don't mean the content of Baldrick's apple crumble). I opened the case, and sure enough, the 80287 chip was not looking happy, with a slight bulge and discoloration of the housing. On closer inspection, the part was labelled 80287 - 10. I checked the other, 8 MHz machine, and it had a co-processor labelled 80287 - 8. I checked some data sheets, and indeed we had been supplied with the cheaper 10 MHz version. It apparently did not like being overclocked. The company claimed I was wrong, but did supply a new 12 MHz one free of charge.

Future machines were sourced elsewhere. Can't think why.

Nothing to do with power supply switches (though I have seen the genie escape on several occasions) but the comment regarding pre-loaded vending cards brought back a couple of memories.

• When I first started working (back in the 1970's) office and factory hot drinks vending machines needed money; that seemed quite normal until (in the early 1980's) I moved into the oil&gas sector where all office machines were set to free vend. It now seems strange to think of staff having to pay for tea and coffee at work.

• One company I worked at, when I started there, had a free staff canteen - everyone on-site was entitled to a free 2/3 course lunch (and it was good food, as well). It wasn't uncommon for contractors and suppliers to favour late morning visits to the offices :). A few years into the scheme and a few staff had started to moan that they couldn't always get their favourite meal on some days. They were told that, with meals being free, they couldn't really complain, so they decided to demand the right to complain. It reached senior management who were pressured into making it possible - by making the canteen no longer free. Needless to say, the moaners were not popular with the rest of the staff (the far greater majority) who now had to pay for their lunches. (I was back in the office several years later and, by then, payment was by staff cards, and staff received a monthly pre-load that covered a basic lunch each day. Contractors and visitors had to load their own cards.)

I was invited to the unveiling of the very first Macintosh to be seen in Christchurch (The NZ one, not Dorset).

Great song and dance. "Have a beer and watch the unboxing".

An Apple employee and a staff member from the local distributor carefully unboxed, unwrapped and plugged it in. Much Oooing and Aaahing.

"Now, we'll turn the power on, and Mac will introduce itself."

Went with a bang. 110V/230V - who cares?

At least the beer was good.