"Oh, the noise was annoying me," replied one of the testing engineers. "So I opened the case and cut the wires."

I bet Ewen wasn't his greatest fan

It will blow over.

Reminds me of one bit in the book of railway disasters "Red for Danger" by LTC Rolt (mid 1950s edition).

One story involved a railyard worker who got fed up with the safety valve releasing excess steam while an engine was being fired up at the start of day, so he tightened the safety valve.

He was rewarded by one of his ears being sliced off by a piece of shrapnel when the boiler case finally gave up.

A testing engineer. An engineer .

This is not supposed to be your secretary making a photocopy of a floppy.

I hope the repairs were taken out of his salary (I know, wishful thinking).

Obviously the numpty wasn't a fan-tastic engineer.

I indeed have photocopied floppy disks, to the utter bafflement (and amusement) of my peers.

In my defense, it was the easiest way to document which field office got which serial number (printed on the disks) of some software (Lotus SmartSuite, IIRC) so we could prove license compliance if needed.

Thankfully it was a breeze to fix...

That depends on what components got cooked.

That's not cool.

"Oh, the noise was annoying me," replied one of the testing engineers. "So I opened the case and cut the wires."

Clearly that "engineer" hadn't been adequately tested before being certified.

Hopefully Mr Snippy doesn't go on to work in a nuclear powerstation † as he obviously wasn't the business end of a screwdriver.

Even you though you know you will regret asking, the question I would pose to this budding Einstein is "why do you think the fans you knobbled were included in the design in the first place?" The only coherent answer I might imagine, if not quite rational: "just to annoy me." If the answer were along the lines that he believed removing cooling fans would cause the hardware to thermally limit its performance then that is only slightly less insane.

I suppose a decade or so later with the advent of ipods etc playing into earphones at 120dB this chap and fellow travellers would be as deaf as doorpost and untroubled by screaming fans although undoubtedly still as daft as a brush.

† those facilities' alarms are known to be a tad annoying. Funny that.

That "engineer" would be shown the door at the next semi-annual layoffs. (The company has layoffs every January & June. Like clockwork.)

All the stuff Ewen's company made, plus a network controller, ended up in a tower PC case. "I believe the CPU was a 486 DX2 66 MHz," he said.

I remember getting a DX2, I had people coming around to see it. Doom was seriously fast on that thing...

Greybeard icon -->

In the previous millennium

I've had visiting sales staff come into the office , find an empty office and :

- unplug the machine in the office so they could plug in their laptop

- switch off external harddrives ``because the noise ...''

- unplug the monitor because they wanted to see if they could use them on their laptop (they were 4BNC or whatever the ones were called with the individual connectors for each channel) and accidentally switching off the machine in the process

Less deliberate, but also

- move the external harddrives aside, so they could put their whatever on the desk, thereby accidentally unseating a scsi cable

Machine left in a closed room to roast because the local manager was terrified people would do things to him if the room wasn't kept locked.

That didn't explain why there was trash everywhere, including burying the machine. I assumed that was just another charming personality trait.

SCSI

Reordering the external SCSI drives for "aesthetic reasons" and losing the terminator.

Basically, since as a BoFH if you cannot lock up your users, you lock away anying important and most other stuff, removing temptation from prying fingers and vacant skulls.

I'm sure I've told this one on here before. Mid 90s, had a call from a remote office in Romania saying their laptop wouldn't sit flat on the desk because it had something sticking out of the bottom.

Got them to send me a photo. The laptop processor cooling fan had stopped working and the machine was overheating. On the laptops we used (from a company in North London, AJP) the processor fan was a modular replacable part, basically a plastic grille cover plate with a very thin fan underneath that sat on the top of the processor..

Instead of letting me know so I could order a replacement fan, they took the machine into a local computer shop who fitted the lowest profile fan they had. Unfortunately this fan was much thicker than the one they were replacing, so they cut a hole in the bottom of the laptop and the fan stuck out about 1cm, well above the 2-3mm rubber feet..

When screensavers with sounds were all the rage, the girl who sat behind me used to have the Haunted House theme. Her job meant that she'd have to leave her desk fairly frequently to process customer orders etc, so the screensaver would turn on a lot. And make all sorts of screaming and creaking noises, which was pretty annoying. So I disabled it. And she re-enabled it. So I uninstalled it. My colleague (unknown to me at the time) helped her to reinstall it. Then one glorious day, while I was covering their lunch breaks, I finally had enough, and took the speaker out of her computer. Problem solved forever!

"When screensavers with sounds were all the rage"

That would have been (roughly) the last week of October, 1991.

My screen saver annoyed people without making a sound.

I loved the maze one. My coworkers, not so much.... I copied the building's depressing style: dark blue flooring, green ceilings and brick walls. "Dispiriting Doom", I used to call it.

Every single day when I got back from lunch break my screen was turned off

... but he wasn't an engineer. He was the owner.

The guy spent quite a bit of money on a new computer for his company, and an office management software package to go with it. The staff took a three day training course to learn how to use it, with three folks from the software company coming in over a three day weekend. The Boss "couldn't make it", and missed the class.

The following weekend, I got a panicked call from the Boss. Seems he had come in to acquaint himself with the new equipment, discovered he didn't even know how to log in to the system, and so decided it was broken and threw a Windows CD into the drive and fired it up to fix it. And got nothing but error messages.

Good thing. The new box was an IBM RT running AIX ... If it had been a Windows-on-Intel machine, he'd have destroyed the entire corporate database.