Lack of knowledge + heat of the moment = bad decisions
I started in the industry in the early eighties and worked as a technical salesperson for a local micro-computer company. We had a client that purchased a 286-based server running SCO Xenix to run a FoxBASE application in a multi-user environment ... pretty hot stuff in those days. The application had been written by a local consultant -- let's call him Dwayne -- who knew FoxBASE in single-user mode on DOS but didn't know Xenix and didn't really want to. Dwayne, who was running behind on his schedule to get the application done and fully taking advantage of the multi-user system, hired Herman, a college student, to do some coding for him.
[Ever worked with a technology that seemed to defy all logic or simply drove you up the wall? Submit your story to offtherecord@infoworld.com]
About four weeks after the system was up and running, Herman was on-site doing some coding and the two office admins came into his office. They told him that the system was locked up and that they couldn't continue their data entry. Their boss was exceptionally impatient and demanding, so they wanted to know what Herman could do to help them. Dwayne hadn't thought it was important for Herman to have anything but user training for Xenix, so he couldn't really do much.
The office admins put pressure on him to do something, so he called Dwayne ... who had been given more extensive training by necessity, even if he didn't want to learn it. Somehow, Dwayne had forgotten that the console had 12 distinct sessions and all he had to do was have the office admins Alt-F key to a different screen. Somehow he had forgotten that there were 15 terminals scattered around the office. Somehow he had forgotten the cheat sheet I had left him that told him how to identify and kill a process. Instead, he told his programmer that he should place a call to me to get help.
Herman called me, but I was out of the office for about 45 minutes (this was in the days before cell phones and pagers). He left a message and went to update the office admins. They pressured him more -- they just couldn't wait 45 minutes. They didn't want to risk the wrath of their boss.
Herman pondered the situation.
He realized that when he turned off his computer at home and turned it back on, that seemed to cure almost all problems. He figured if it worked for his computer, it would work for this one, too.
So he flicked off the power switch on the system.
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