Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - have you ever completely fucked something up at work?

dogzilla · 09-10-2003, 05:06 AM

I wasn't directly at fault, but had an incident at work about 15 years ago.

I worked in software tech support at the time for mainframe machines and got a callout at something like 2:00AM, some mainframe would not boot.

I called the tech at the customer site and went thru diagnostics to find a particular card was interfering with the bootup. I asked the tech to unplug the card and try to boot the machine. The machine would no longer power on.

So now we try to diagnose why that's happening. It turns out the tech had only partially unplugged the card and connections were still made to the card, but now to incorrect points and the result was to burn something out. Oops. Fortunately this was one of the smaller mainframes, only costing something like $100,000.

I told the tech to get back to me after they fixed the machine.

That's the only time I remember burning out hardware trying to fix a software problem.

09-10-2003, 05:06 AM	#6 (permalink)
dogzilla Junkie Location: New York	I wasn't directly at fault, but had an incident at work about 15 years ago. I worked in software tech support at the time for mainframe machines and got a callout at something like 2:00AM, some mainframe would not boot. I called the tech at the customer site and went thru diagnostics to find a particular card was interfering with the bootup. I asked the tech to unplug the card and try to boot the machine. The machine would no longer power on. So now we try to diagnose why that's happening. It turns out the tech had only partially unplugged the card and connections were still made to the card, but now to incorrect points and the result was to burn something out. Oops. Fortunately this was one of the smaller mainframes, only costing something like $100,000. I told the tech to get back to me after they fixed the machine. That's the only time I remember burning out hardware trying to fix a software problem.