🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, since Les Earnest insists on posting really interesting stories
instead of letting this newsgroup degenerate like all the rest, I suppose
I should support his effort and tell you about my good friend "Professor"
Moriarty.

My friend "Professor" Moriarty started out as an IBM computer
operator, working for a supervisor who was both incompetent and
interfering.  The supervisor would screw up every job he touched, and
in the process cause a lot more work for the other employees.  After a
few weeks of correcting the supervisor's mistakes, Moriarty devised a
way to keep him out of trouble.  He wrote a small program that just
spun a tape backwards and forwards and wrote to it at random
intervals.

Whenever Moriarty had to take a break he would pause the real work of
the department, and start his special job.  The supervisor would see
the system running, lights blinking, and tapes moving, so everything
looked fine.  There would never be any console messages or inputs
required, so the supervisor never got an opportunity to screw things
up.  Later, Moriarty would come back from his lunchbreak, stop the fake
job, and resume the real work.

The supervisor inadvertently boomeranged Moriarty however.  Feeling
playful one day, Moriarty flipped a switch on the console so that it
printed out in hexadecimal instead of ASCII.  This made all messages
appear completely unintelligible, so Moriarty called the supervisor
over, saying "Hey, take a look at this, there must be something
wrong."  The supervisor took one glance and pressed the "total system
reset" before anyone could stop him.   Moriarty spent the rest of the
afternoon restarting jobs from checkpoints, and restoring the
filesystem from backups.

The moral of the story?  "If you live in California, expect to get 
sprayed with malathion every few weeks."