Re: OTM: Oddly non-ubiquitous skills

In article <1145911627@xxxxxxxxx>, Wayne Throop <throopw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Oooh, oooh, a sort of "nobody's fault" version of this, with the problem
occuring for both helper/helpee, is the one about saving the floppy disk.
Back when they were really thin and floppy, before the hard-shelled ones.
Walk the helpee though the process of saving data by phone, and everything
works, and the floppy verifies, but they always call back the next day and
can't access it. Helpee steps through everything they do in laborious,
excruciating detail, describing everything to the helper down to each
keystroke and each movement and each bit of text read, taking a loooong
time, ending with "... and now I'm sticking it to the filing cabinet,
so it's handy." "Sticking it? Sticking how?" "With a magnet."
Don't know if it's a true story, but it's one of those stories that,
if it isn't true, should be.

The way I heard that was probably an earlier version, when all
the computers were IBM and were in offices. The customer phones
IBM, explains the problem, and the tech reps can't figure it out
over the phone so they come into the office, insert various kinds
of shaggy-doggery as necessary, ending with them SEEING the
secretary sticking the disk to her nearby file cabinet with a
magnet. Usually described as a cute kitchen-type magnet with
puppies or little girls or flowers on it.

There's a variant in which the tech rep comes in and watches the
secretary go through the whole business, and ends with her saying
"And now I label it," and rolling the floppy disk with the label
on it into her typewriter to type the label.

I think Hal told me most of these, which may mean the IBM tech
reps told him about them and they may even have been true.

Certainly the one is true in which the operator came into the
computer room and tried to access a disk drive. This, back in
the days when disk packs were great big stacky things two feet
across and a foot high, and the machines that read them were the
size of small washing machines. He couldn't get an answer from the
drive, so he popped open the machine and an adjacent machine and
swapped the packs. He couldn't get an answer from EITHER of them
now, so he opened two more drives and swapped packs, and now FOUR
of them didn't answer.

The first pack had had a head crash which had also damaged the
disk pack. But he didn't realize this, so he just kept swapping ...

He was up to thirty-two before they stopped him.

This happened at Decimus in San Francisco, a subset of Bank of
America, in the late 1960s.

Fortunately, they backed up to tape every night, so they had lost
only one day's work, which they were able to recover
(laboriously) from paper.

Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx
.

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