internal monologue failure...

sferguson524

sferguson524

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Had my internal monlogue fail me this morning.. Blasting death metal into my ear holes while troubleshooting a network issue, apparently quite loudly i said YGBFSM... My boss gave me the stink eye which was when i realized it was out loud.. Whoops.
 
This is ok for me in the datacenter... boss man frowns on it when users may be in earshot.
 
sferguson524 said:
Yeah, some VPs and directors heard it.. Whoops
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And then worried about any ninnies within earshot that might cause them trouble, and after no signs of same, went in a conference room and said the same thing out loud. Haha.
 
Wait, stand over there you guys, I gotta release the smoke.


There -- yeah, that's got it. Go ahead and turn the Halon sensors back on.
 
I got a call from one of my coworkers out at a site. They said they started up the software and it printed out "You've got to be kidding." They said it sounded like one of my error messages. Admittedly, it was, but in some case that shouldn't have ever happened (who recompiled this thing for a Cray?).

I got a call when one of my early internet routers was deployed at the Space Telescope Receiving Lab. They called to say that they had brought up a Vax on the network and now the router was printing errors.

ME: What kind of errors?
THEM: Something about the Interlan (ethernet) transmitter.
ME: (thinking about the error messages in that driver) Is it printing out CSR values?
THEM: No, it's something about trailers.
ME: (aha!) Is it "Trailers make me barf?"
THEM: Yes, that's it.

Years ago I worked at the Interop tradeshow. We had a nice guy supervising the thing but we couldn't trust him not to give out the router password to any idiot who asked, so someone came up with the idea of using "fellatio" which he would be too embarrassed to relate to others. The only problem was people couldn't remember how to spell it. A few months later I got a special show T-shirt that had "two l's, one e, and one a" silk screened over the pocket.
 
I flew my Citabria from San Diego to Carefree AZ one Sunday. AMEX was down hard for most of the midwest terminals, they couldn't process any cards in a bunch of states.

So, I rushed to the datacenter, they waved me by security, I went in expecting to find an IBM 3745 in paroxis with flames coming out and nasty messages all over the screen. Hmmm - nope, all quiet here, except all the modem lines were in loop testing. Hmmmm - say that again. 'All - the - modem - lines - were - looping.' I walked over to rack, after rack, after rack of those black faced ATT modems and looked at the buttons on the front. Every one of them, the 'LPBK' button was in. So, I started to deselect them. Three rows of two racks per row with ~12 per rack. Checked the controller and no more loopback. Hopped in my plane and headed for my parents house in Prescott. That was an expensive mistake.
 
I got one call where someone called and said the console was printing out errors continuously. I told them to scroll back through the pile of paper and tell me what the first one said. "RP01 offline." Now look in the top of the drive and tell me, is it spinning?
"No." Turn the switch to STOP then to RUN and tell people not to lean on the front of the drive anymore.
 
flyingron said:
I got one call where someone called and said the console was printing out errors continuously. I told them to scroll back through the pile of paper and tell me what the first one said. "RP01 offline." Now look in the top of the drive and tell me, is it spinning?

"No." Turn the switch to STOP then to RUN and tell people not to lean on the front of the drive anymore.
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LOL. Like that one. Had a couple similar ones happen with unguarded power services at data centers.
 
After the Northridge earthquake on Mon morning, I was taking care of the family the rest of the day. It was still shaking once in a while on Tue night when I went into the First Interstate bank data center. One of the IBM 3090-600 chassis were tipped over, and sticking down through the raised floor. There was a massive beam from the ceiling stabbing through it.

We scrapped it. I still have a heat sink and module sheared in bits from that machine as a souvenir.
 
When I worked at Delta, I was in a meeting in which I referred to what was going on in it as "mental masturbation." I thought three of the people would faint dead away. That is one uptight corporate culture.
 
In a Change Control Board meeting for a final approval from all departments for a final new product release the Engineering manager was babbling about how stuffing a parallel port to Ethernet converter inside the box and hiding it with a cable and a little panel that went on the outside to make the product look like it had been designed for Ethernet networks from the very start, was a "very creative solution".

My boss, the Product Support manager blurted out, "That's not a solution, that's a ****ing kludge!"

He got about an hour in the CEOs office and another hour in HR for that little transgression. The new product was the CEO's baby and no one in three years of development had bothered to tell him the baby was really really ugly.

It was scrapped a year later and customers were offered a better than fiscally possible deal to upgrade to the next product.

The only telecom crazy enough to keep theirs and run it for a decade with monthly complaints that it never did what it was supposed to do when it was sold to them, was NTT in Japan. Three years after the "kludge" event and for seven more years, a nice polite Japanese engineer would call and request "formal complaint" and support for reloading the thing from scratch after blowing away the database. We literally had a canned speech and text to send him in email for his ticket that never changed. Offered him a below cost price on the new system and free shipping from Japan and recycling services for the old one. They hadn't taken up the offer by the time the entire product line of 20 years had been shut down and service terminated on all of them, even the successful ones.
 
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