Now John was no dummy. If it wasn't the disk pack, he reasoned, it had to be the drive. He proceeded to take one of the test disk packs he had tried over to one of the spare drives, mount it, and spin it up. Down it came. Really strange. So he got another disk pack. Still no change, whereupon he tried another idle drive. Now totally confused but not about to quit, John then swapped disk packs and drives more or less at random. By the time his supervisor showed up to see what the problem was, John had “discovered” that there were some five drives and at least nine disk packs that just would not spin up.
By now the old-timers reading this are probably busting a gut because they know what had happened. The problem was that the original drive had shed a drive head, damaged the original disk pack, and spun down. That's what the status lights (which John could not read) said. When John put the now-damaged original disk pack in a new drive, it immediately destroyed the heads on the new drive and the drive spun down. And so on, and so on. Result: the loss of many tens of thousands of 1960s dollars’ worth of hardware.
But this tale does have a happier ending. When all this was reported to the operations manager the next morning by a shame-faced John and his equally embarrassed supervisor, instead of exploding, the manager took this as a chance to change procedures for both operations and training. John was not fired. As a matter of fact, many years later he was promoted to the position of operations manager.
Throughout his career John never forgot the lesson he had learned and often told the story himself when instructing new staff.
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