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On guard Join us to celebrate the Day of Appreciation for System Administrators with a story of bravery, courage and hairstyling, on call?
Today's story comes from "Andrew", a reader who worked in the early 80's for a company now best known for creating white paint with subtle hues of colors, pretentious names and exorbitant prices.
In those dark times, when Paint had names like "Thatcher Blue" and "Scargill Chip", Andrew was doing his first job brilliantly, taking calls and taking care of the audience. He was about to provide help when "the incident" occurred.
"I was pbading one of the Departmental Dot Matrix Printers (DMPs)," explained Andrew, "when I saw a woman with very long hair standing in front of the printer."
The hardware was, as it was the norm at the time, an IBM ProPrinter. The 80-column matrix beast had been a huge commercial success for Big Blue, with the ProPrinter range becoming a bestseller. This fact would be of great solace for his victim.
Andrew went on to her appointment when "a few seconds after I pbaded her, she started screaming as if she were being murdered."
Although the IT support staff could be an alarming group, Andrew was not the norm: "It took me between 2 and 2.5 seconds to notice the problem: his hair had been caught in the DPM roll. . "
Perhaps the user was very interested in the inner workings of ProPrinter. Or maybe she just had a very bad posture. In both cases: "his face was closer and closer to the internal mechanism of the printer at a speed of about 0.5 cm per second".
Andrew dived for the catch, but found a helpful person who had screwed the ground plug firmly. After a few precious seconds, he managed to remove the power cable from the back of the Big Blue User Eater, leaving the victim "screaming and crying uncontrollably", just 20 cm from the bowels of the # 39; s device.
At that time, Andrew observed, "all this fuss had attracted a crowd of people offering unusable advice."
We can imagine.
Always helpful, Andrew told us: "I tried, but I failed, to flip the roll of printing using the huge button on the side to free the woman from his precarious state. "
It was time to call on a higher authority, and Andrew went looking for people with the skills to deal with the problem. The IT manager suggested sending a memo stating that we should not leave hair hanging in printers. The BOFH, of course, had a practical solution to the immediate problem.
It involved scissors.
Since this particular model could not be restored and the user was too close to the machine to allow disbadembly (of the printer, not the user), the only way to 39; extracting the user was to appeal to an impromptu hairstyle.
"When the lady heard the solution, other lamentations, crying and sobs ensued.As I was the PFY, I had the dubious honor of cutting her hair. "
The accident resulted in the barn door slamming long after the furry horse was locked with a memo stating that "the clear plastic cover of these printers should never be opened to allow a better view of the number of pages. printed. "
A warning label was also glued to all printers with a stern "Do not open that lid until the printer is not turned off and you only change the paper!"
And as for the printer? "The departments on the other side of the room did not want to share their DMP," so it took a two-story message to collect 80 column impressions from the large 132-column printer.
The extra surprise exercise continued until Andrew had recovered all the hair, which took a while, because IBM (rightly) decided that "clean the hair of A printer "was not in their service contract."
Andrew herself "never thanked me for saving me from total disaster," but he gave me the wrong look every time she pbaded me, as if it was my fault if she now looked like the main character. in the movie 2001 'Amelie & # 39; "
It could have been worse.
Have you ever been called to extract an ungrateful user from a tricky situation that they had created? On call must have your news. ®
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