Who, Me? There's nothing like a bit of schadenfreude to ease the pain of re-entering the working week, which is why The Reg kicks off every Monday morning with an instalment of Who, Me? in which readers share tales of tech support gone not so well. Hopefully it will make you feel better about yourselves.
This week's legit hero is a guy we'll Regomize as "Vivian" who worked as a personal assistant to the general manager of a regional office of a hardware manufacturer.
Viv shared his office with around 300 employees. Most of the PCs in the place were '486s running either Windows for Workgroups or – for the lucky few – Windows NT. They were all networked at the breakneck speed of 10 megabits per second, which was actually kind of fast for the time.
Crucially for the story, internet access for the office relied on a Unix box connected to the mail server in the main office, down the coast. All of the company mail for all offices went through the server in the main office – a classic bottleneck if ever there was one.
One of the tasks that landed on Viv’s desk was helping to arrange an office move, and an employee poll to let workers have their say about the company’s next home
Viv decided staff deserved to see the options management had picked, so in the spirit of "we're all one big family here" he took photos of three prospective new locations with a mid-'90s digital camera, attached them to an email to all staff, and hit "Send."
- After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?
- Personalized pop-up was funny for about a second, until it felt like stalking
- Did you hear the one about the help desk chap who abused privileges to prank his mate?
- I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!
When recipients received the email they tried to open the pictures – and that's when all hell broke loose.
Or, more accurately, when all hell came to a grinding standstill because all those emails, and the load they imposed on the network, saw every computer freeze.
When the IT guy was called, he discovered that the problem was that those photos were .BMP format – a file format that to this day eschews compression. JPEGs were a thing at the time, but clearly a fairly new thing, and Viv wanted each and every employee to savour the images in all their magnificent mid-'90s uncompressed pixely glory.
Each image was over three megabytes, so the email weighed in at a hefty 10MB. Even these days you'd get a stern talking-to for sending that to all staff, so you can imagine how Viv's superiors felt.
The IT guy did sort the hung servers – both of them, as the main office mail server didn't like the traffic either – and re-sent the images as far more petite JPEGs.
Tragically, our correspondent could not recall whether one of the offices whose picture crashed the company ended up chosen as the new location. We suspect they'd have been at a disadvantage in the vote.
Ever found your enthusiasm for a project exceeding the capabilities of the tech – or your knowledge of how it worked? Click here to send an email to Who, Me? and tell us the tale. We might share it on some future Monday to remind fellow readers that we all mess up sometimes – so it's OK. ®