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Exceptional?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The "Worst deploy story" discussion prompted this discussion.
We had a remote server go crazy. Usually we can log in remotely and at least do something with it. But not this time. It was going nuts.
Our I.T. guy drove the 15 miles to the remote location and found someone had placed a heavy tool tray on the servers keyboard holding down one or more keys which kept repeating.
Only managers were allowed in the remote location's computer room. As expected, no one confessed.
Any more "Dumb Things People Do" stories?
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The I.T. guy should have started to walk out with the tool tray and see who yelled. 
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trantrum wrote: someone had placed a heavy tool tray on the servers keyboard
Dumb!?! Ingenious more like.
It's a fantastic hardware virus. 
I'm sure it was written by nefarious hackers and it is very difficult for virus scanners to pick up on this sort of thing.
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I used to provide some mainframe automation by replacing the operators' terminals with PCs running emulators and some special servers talking directly to the mainframe.
I would get called out in the middle of the night (24x7 operations - an airline) because they kept losing connectivity for a few minutes almost every night at a random time between 1am and 3am. I couldn't work out what was happening except the PCs would lose connection to the servers because the servers would reset themselves for no apparent reason. It was as if the power had been cut off from the UPS and restored a few minutes later. I thought, "Aha! Faulty UPSes?". They were checked and reported themselves fully operational with no problems and no outages for months! Weirdly, this didn't happen at weekends.
So the following night, a Tuesday, I sat where I could see the server. At around 1:30 the cleaners came in and started cleaning. After a few minutes one of them came over to the UPS, unplugged the server, plugged in a vacuum cleaner, used it few a few minutes and then unplugged it and plugged in the server once more! The bodies were never found...
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Forogar wrote: unplugged it and plugged in the server once more! The bodies were never found...
True LOL!
Great story.
People are dumb. I are a people.
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That reminded me of a client (before the days of remoting) that would call to report that the software was 'hanging' and timing out on some database operations. This only happened sporadically but usually once or twice a day. The application was a running on a PC in a small office of a warehouse. The SQL Server was housed in another office across the parking lot and the connection was a point to point wireless bridge. The worked well until a truck pulled into the dock blocking the signal. The client never made the 'connection' and it took an onsite visit to figure out. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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In the late 90s, I had the pleasure of meeting a consultant who provided his Windows Administration skills to several clients.
A story he told me concerned a client who repeatedly called to say that the "server was slow and it took forever to print".
He'd talk them through going to the server room, getting to the console, logging on, checking Task Manager, etc.
At which point the server would suddenly start serving and printing again.
He got this call several times. Eventually he went to the client site, went to the server...
And found to his dismay that someone had changed the screen saver from "Blank" to "Pipes" with maximum colors and complexity.
He changed it back to Blank. Problem solved.
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This adds an entire new meaning to the word "dumb" 
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A couple of years ago a dev server I was using went down.
I went to investigate, it was on a desk in a room with a number of other low priority servers, stuff for which there was no room in the secure server room.
A consultant from a company doing work on behalf of someone had been setup in there, when his laptop battery was getting low he pulled a plug to make space for his.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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Once I saw a UPs system that should empower all the computers of a factory with the output cable ending with a normal male plug.
The company was still in the building stage but that was amazing...
Imagine somebody burning to ashes as the big UPS was completely full...
Once I was working in a company manufacturing machines for the meat industry (killing all kind of animals,...), when we were starting the computer network with an old backoffice NT server that took 20 minutes to start in our customer's facility we had to plug into a plug that was downstairs.
We placed a piece of paper covering the plug and a note saying:
"Don't unplug this cable, sensible and expensive IT equipment plugged"
After half an hour of work all our computers died to start after some seconds.
We went downstairs and saw that the paper was a little bit lousy and that two cables were reaching the plug... our cable and another one... we followed that other cable until we reached a fat operator on a ladder welding (yes welding) something on the roof.
I asked him his name, the company he worked for and asked where had he plugged the welding equipment. He told us that he had to remove a paper, unplug a cable and make a provisional connection by winding his cables against ours. When I asked him if he was capable to read and he answered that he was... I told him... "do you know that all the computers have stopped suddenly and that something could be broken?"
The answer was:
"But... it has been only a moment!"
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Getting out of bed??
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Many years ago I got an emergency support call from our mainframe support staff telling me that all of the menus on the one PC based system they had had disappeared and they were unable to process overtime payments for the UK prison system, which would cause huge ructions.
I jumped in a taxi for a five mile journey to the computer suite, spent ten minutes getting through security, then looked at the system fo3 30 seconds. I then turned up the brightness on the monitor and walked out.
The government department I worked for employed a firm of cleaners to tour the building every few months, cleaning monitors, keyboards and phones. While cleaning this particular monitor, they had wiped over the brightness and contrast controls (physical dials for those of you who have only ever worked with flat screen monitors), switching them both down to about 10% of normal
=========================================================
I'm an optoholic - my glass is always half full of vodka.
=========================================================
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One of my first IT jobs involved doing general IT support for a smallish company based in a converted church. The offices weren't ideal and some leads and cables were stretched a bit tight.
At least five times one lad called me because his pic either wouldn't turn on or had turned off. Each time I went over and pushed the plug back into the wall socket.
At my next job I had to do out of hours front line support in the evenings. Many of the users we had never logged in, the computers were just always on, they used generic user names, and there was no timeout to login screen.
One bloke phoned me up because he had encountered the login screen for the first time, had found the manual with the username and password in, but when he was trying to type in the password it just displayed stars and not what he was typing.
Users who know absolutely nothing are a lot easier than those who think they know something.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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Two stories, both second-hand:
One of my profs worked on the vehicle entry barrier system for the new fruit market in London. There were repeated reports that the software was crashing, but nobody could find a bug. He gave up checking the code and went to the site to record all events leading to a crash. Clients of the market had to pay 50p to enter, but delivery drivers were allowed in free; controlled by a booth for all the entry barriers. The prof saw a delivery driver pull up and the controller sent the signal to open the gate. Before the driver entered, he then dropped 50p into the coin slot. The state machine clearly hadn't accounted for such generosity.
My first job was in the International Telegraph division of the post office (telex etc.). Overseas channels were protected by ARQ (Automatic ReQuest for repetition) equipment that changed 5 bit code to 7 bit to detect transmission errors. These circuits were very expensive (satellite communications) and one circuit to Australia would regularly go down around mid-morning. Nobody could find the fault. It never lasted long, but remained a mystery for some time. By chance, one of the engineers spotted an operator who had a stool by one rack of equipment. When the operator took his tea break, he'd lean back against the rack which pressed a button to busy out the circuit. It cost countless thousands in lost revenue!
Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.
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One of the greatest Hockey player that ever played the game.
Jean Beliveau[^] played for the "Canadiens de Montréal" and won the Stanley Cup 10 times as a player and an additional 7 time as member of the team.
Was renown as being one, if not the most gentleman in the sport.
![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
I'd rather be phishing!
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Ciao number 4 !
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Entropy isn't what it used to.
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If you can levitate, raise my hand.
«OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. » Alan Kay's clarification on what he meant by the term "Object" in "Object-Oriented Programming."
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Is the Kindle format ebook from Manning actually readable on a Kindle? Does anybody have that ebook? It has a lot of C# source code listings inside, I wonder if the publishers actually used some special formatting.
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Don't have that one. The only programming book I tried reading on my Kindle was a python one that someone here promoted on the lounge (IIRC as a free download). When I finally got around to looking at it (IIRC a week or so after the fact), it was as much of a cluster-elephant as I feared it would be. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I've a number of code books on Kindle - all the code samples are basically unreadable...so I'd guess not.
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Are they Kindle formats (MOBI, AZW) or PDF? I know PDFs don't work well on Kindle.
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Kindle format - bought from Amazon. It is just due to the number of characters across...any big C# (or java) code listing always ends up wrapping and being followed by a large flock of seagulls.
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Yes, also it's by Jon Skeet which is a major plus 
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