When I was working help desk at the Bank of New York, I got a call, nothing out of the ordinary, from a secretary somewhere in the building who said her machine was dead. Power button? Nothing. Plugged in? Yes. Into a power strip? No. Mains controlled by possibly malfunctioning wall switch? No. OK, looks like you'll need a service call--let me have the tag number on the side of the machine. "OK," said said secretary, "and I might as well tell you, the printer isn't working either." H'mm. What's the probability of that? I wondered. "... and neither is the coffeepot." What? No coffee? "Never mind that tag number, ma'am, you need building maintenance. Sounds like you blew a circuit breaker." On 6/7/2025 8:47 PM, Jackie McBride via Blind-sysadmins wrote:
John, when you know you gotta do those types of commands, wearing brown pants is always best.
Jackie McBride Proofpoint Certified Email Authentication Specialist 2024 Author 36: Last Hours of a Life Be a hero. Fight Scams. Learn how at www.scam911.org/ Also check out wp4newbs.com brightstarsweb.com mysitesbeenhacked.com
On Sat, Jun 7, 2025 at 5:36 PM John G. Heim via Blind-sysadmins < blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> wrote:
It's a beautiful Saturday evening in June -- time for a story. Today i was messing around with computers and I remembered something that happened years ago. I was working for the Math Dept at the University Of Wisconsin and I had to type in a command that, if I typed it in wrong, could really do a lot of damage. If I did it wrong, I would have to reinstall stuff, restore from backups, etc. It might take days. So I checked and double checked what I had typed. Then I stopped and checked it again, just in case. Finally, I hit the enter key and ... my machine went down. I could hear the hard drive and the fan spin to a stop. Worse, all the machines in the room were going down. And then I realized that even the lights had gone off! It was only a split second before it hit me -- this was just a coincidence. The building had suffered a power outage and it had nothing to do with what I had typed. But for that split second, I came pretty close to filling my pants.