RE: Dumb Things People Do

Two events, one conclusion.

In the mid 1980's I was going to programming school by day an acting as
the swing shift operator at an insurance company at night. The S/38 in
my swing job had developed a habit of going down in the middle of the
day for no apparent reason. This is a HUGE problem because it shuts the
whole business down and the average time to rebuild the database access
paths on that machine was 11-13 hours. After several months of this,
the organization is getting really frustrated, and is ready to rip the
S/38 out and replace it with... anything.

The IBM CE has been in multiple times and replaced every card and
component he can think of, but nothing seems to affect the problem. The
problem is so random that everyone is baffled. Any thought of blaming
it on the ops manager (who works days) are out the window because the
problem happens even when he is out of the computer room.

Meanwhile, at programming school, there is a big controversy about
operations students deleting the source code of programming students.
At this school programming students typed their code in at a keypunch
machine and the data was written to an 8" diskette. They then would
turn it over to operations students who had the responsibility to load
the data to the mainframe. On several (also random) occasions
programming students complained that their source code was missing or
corrupted when the operations students loaded it.

Finally the Ops instructor solved the riddle. He noticed that
operations students would sometimes place the telephone on top of the 8"
diskettes. If a phone call was received, the old big black telephone
would ring and emit enough of a magnetic discharge to scramble the data
on the diskette. The Operations instructor tested his theory several
times and conclusively proved the ringing phone is the cause of the
problem.

The afternoon this mystery was solved, I walked into the computer room
of my night job and see the same style big black telephone on top of the
S/38 between the Diskette magazines and the display panel. I mention to
my Ops manager that this was the cause of the data loss at school. He
assures me that the telephone could not possibly be the cause of the
S/38 outages. But he never put the phone there again, and the problem
never occurred again.

jte

--

John Earl, VP and Chief Technology Officer
PowerTech: 253-872-7788
Direct: 253-479-1408
Mobile: 206-669-3336
John.Earl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx




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