🚀 go-pugleaf

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.

Back more than 10 years ago, I had a job working as Virginia
Commonwealth University.  One of the people in Systems Programming was
said to be able to "piss Jesus Christ off in a three minute phone
call" and managed to get one of the student consultants totally ticked
off.  

Now this same student consultant was in charge of the training of
neophytes in the use of the 370/148 and 370/158.  Several partitions
were reserved to allow those students to run WATBOL (Waterloo Cobol),
WATFIV (Waterloo Fortran, but better than WATFOR) and several other
fast batchers.  These students would punch card decks and submit jobs.
Perhaps a thousand per day.  But they weren't there to learn JCL.  So
the student consultant would just give them a JOB card to copy.

Now this systems programmer had the userid BRYDON, and the student
consultant told the people in his class that a JOB card had to include
the clause NOTIFY=BRYDON to be valid.

Now, on TSO, you could issue a command to turn inter-user messages
off, but these notify messages didn't come from another user, they
came from the system.  And you couldn't turn system messages off,
since you might get an emergency warning from an operator, telling you
to save and log off.  Management wouldn't let him put a fix in.  The
terminals were glass, but ran in line mode, and the messages would
interfere with whatever he was doing.

Two years later, he was still, occasionally, getting a notification
that some student's WATFIV job had been run.

Sometimes, the simplest revenges can be the best.

-- 
Nick Simicich --- uunet!bywater!scifi!njs --- n...@ibm.com (Internet)