🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <11...@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> ad...@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Adam Glass) writes:
>Does anyone out there have any great revenge stories? I was wondering
>what to give a particular sys admin (who is absolutely, universally
>hated with a passion) when I graduate this spring.
>
>"Cookie" and "Robin Hood" were excellent. Let's hear some more.

Ok, one more.

It seems that a large university had just taken delivery of one of the
first IBM 360's to hit the streets.  One of the system programmers had
written a program that ran in the registers.  Its function was to zero all
of memory, ending with itself.  It was quite a sight, the program would
start (unbeknownst to all except the perpetrator) and in no time
everything would halt.  IBM service went over the machine from top to
bottom and then bottom to top.  It passed all the diagnostics.  Five
minutes after the service folk were gone bingo! it'd stop again.  Back
would come service, all diagnostics passed, they'd leave, it would stop
again and so on.  The engineers were going nuts.  Finally, they decided
the problem was software.  The software engineers found nothing.  The
machine kept stopping.  Finally one day one of the systems programmers
took one of the service guys aside and said, "Look, we've been thinking it
over and we're convinced it's hardware."

"Can't be." said the service type.

"Oh yes, we're convinced.  No doubt about it.  In fact we know exactly
what the problem is.  You see it's a bus problem.  The bus is not properly
terminated and that's what's causing the trouble."

"What are you talking about?"  Said the service man, "That's impossible."

"No, you see when we ordered this machine we specified 512k of memory and
you only let us have 256k.  We're convinced that if you ship the rest of
the memory the bus will be properly terminated and the problem will go
away.  Otherwise we're sure it will keep happening."

And you know what?  He was right.  The bus was not properly terminated.
The extra 256k arrived jolly quick, and the problem went away, just like
that.