BASTARD OPERATOR FROM HELL #12

By Simon Travaglia (spt@waikato.ac.nz)

I get to work and I'm a bit tired so I plug a thick hunk of copper across
the three phase supply and throw the switch. The room is plunged into
darkness as the circuit breakers trip and for once the machine room is
silent.

I like it.

I pop the phone off the hook and close the curtains on the observation
window. Now it's really dark in there. I wouldn't be surprised if someone
had an accident in here..

I lift a couple of floor tiles up in the darkness and call our maintenance
contractors saying the mini popped the breaker again, then replace the
fuses in it with a couple of nails and short the power supply to ground.
You can't just hope for this sort of thing, you've got to MAKE it happen.

15 minutes later the engineer arives and falls down the hole. I pop the
floor tiles back on just as the System Manager (a new and very thorough
individual) comes in, telling me to watch out, someone could really hurt
themselves in the dark...

I nod & tell him that we can't really afford all the downtime, and should I
just throw the breaker and hope that there was no major fault. After
thinking about the negative publicity we're getting already, he makes the
last decision of his short career and tells me to go ahead.

Later, when the smoke clears I examine the smoking remains of the mini. Not
a pretty sight...

"Strange that the breaker jammed shut, isn't it?" I say to our manager as
he packs up the personal things in his office. "One in a million chance. A
pity that someone saw what you did and posted the whole story to comp.misc.
You'll be lucky to get a job managing a car computer after all that
publicity..."

I go back to the machine room and throw the rest of the breakers to liven
everything up, then login and start deleting users' email. I spot an
interesting off-the-record sexual proposition from our male consultant to a
member of the men's swim team which will make a good motd, so I copy it
there, modify root's owner name to be "Winker" and password to be
"ljkadlkajflkj" (then call the big boss to report a suspected intrusion).
Should be at least a couple of hours of login time before we can sort that
out. In the meantime, people are just going to have to read that message...

I realise the message has been read when I hear the gunshot from behind the
consultant's closed door.

I edit the online helpdesk information and change the phone number to the
System Manager's - he'll probably appreciate the extra calls at such a sad
time... I hear another shot and realise he won't be answering any calls
today. I put the phone back on the hook and flip today's excuse card. "Poor
power conditioning". Too plausible. "STATIC BUILDUP". Still a bit too
plausible for my liking, but I don't want to run out of cards before the
end of the year, so I decide to run with it.

The phone rings almost as soon as I've got "Top Gun" in the video machine
so I pause the video and put the phone on hands-free.

"I think I've bought a bad floppy disk"

"Yes?" I wonder if I've suddenly become the consumer's watchdog?

"Well, I've got this disk and it won't format. All the others in the box
did so I thought I must have a bad disk"

"Why are you calling me about this?" I ask

"Well, the disk says guaranteed; where do I go to get a replacement?"

Ah! Of course.

"Well, let's see. Are you sure it's the disk, and not just some problem
with static buildup?"

"Huh?"

"Static Buildup, you know, static electricity that's passed from you to the
computer"

"But I'm wearing a wrist strap!"

Around about now I realise I'm deep in dweeb country. Wrist straps aren't
fashion accessories in my part of town...

"Of course you are, but your average wrist strap has a 1 meg resistor in
series with it, a really poor earth. What you need is a direct earth
connection. Hang onto the frame of something that's earthed properly."

"What, you mean like our stainless steel bench?"

"Excellent. Now, have you got a paper clip to discharge the static with?"

"Hang on. Yeah"

"Ok, with your other hand, poke the clip thru the ventilation holes at the
back of the unit, and just touch the contact at the end of the thick red
wire."

"The one going to the power supply?"

"Yep, that's it"

"....Hey, isn't that the li... >kzzzzt!< >clunk<"

Another call solved by the helpdesk from hell...