Who, Me? The Register does not particularly like Mondays, but rather than shoot the whole day down we prefer to brighten it with a fresh instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers share tales of times the silicon chips inside their heads got switched to overload.
This week's hero is a bloke we shall Regomize as "Rodney" who recalled an incident from his undergraduate days in the early 1980s. All the students worked on remote terminals – PCs not having become ubiquitous yet – connected to an Amdahl mainframe hidden somewhere deep in the bowels of the university.
Everyone who remembers the name Amdahl should now stroke your gray beards and nod sagely.
Also somewhere deep in the bowels of the university was the person responsible for operating and maintaining the Amdahl mainframe: a being known only as OPERATOR. None of the students had met or even seen OPERATOR. For all they knew, OPERATOR could have been one person or many, or a dragon for that matter.
One thing they knew was that OPERATOR was generally benevolent and helpful but lacked a sense of humor. This was an issue, as Rodney told us that humor was omnipresent on campus.
One example of this humor was a script that allowed a user on one console to send a message to another console user. The program came with a smallish set of predefined insults (mainly pinched from Monty Python) and it would pick one at random to send to the chosen victim.
You can imagine the hilarity.
- Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word
- Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke
- Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage
- Cigarette break burned out a huge chunk of Africa's internet
Rodney used the program to great effect among his peers and it gained sufficient fame that a classmate asked for a copy. Rodney shared the script, but in the transfer process it somehow became corrupted.
The form of this corruption was simple, yet deadly. The variable in which one placed the intended recipient of the insult, which should have been %param1%, was instead hard-coded to OPERATOR.
You no doubt realize what happened next. Rodney's friend attempted to send himself an insult to check the program worked. Upon receiving nothing, he tried again. And again. And again …
After many failed attempts, Rodney’s friend was booted unceremoniously from the system by OPERATOR, who evidently did not appreciate being repeatedly told his father smelled of elderberries. OPERATOR sent a brief message with "some very harsh commentary from the engine room about wasting time and resources."
Every attempt to log back in to plead his case was met with rejection.
Eventually Rodney's classmate explained the situation to the powers-that-be in order to be reinstated to the computer system. Of course, this involved identifying Rodney as the source of the offending script.
Thankfully the p-t-b were far less grumpy than the legendary OPERATOR, so no further disciplinary action was taken and Rodney was not sanctioned, which rather irked his friend.
The Who, Me? mailbag is crying out to be fed! If you have a tale you've been hanging onto, waiting for the moment to be right, click here to send an email to Who, Me? so we can save another Monday morning with hijinks. ®