[TUHS] Cryptic Unix Commands

[William Pechter]

The only time I hid something like that was back in my Field Service days.

I smoked a third party data comm board which cost $$$$ while trying to
replace it.
DEC had me do something for one of my customers on a third party hardware
install.   I had no docs, training or experience with the board.
Unfortunately, the vendor didn't key a power cable and I flipped the damned
two pin wire blowing the chip top right off the board.

Wasn't sure it was my fault.  I stayed with the call until they got another
board and they got the box up and running and I finally figured I was the
cause
of the issue.  Didn't volunteer the info since I wasn't sure.   Probably
should've taken the hit.  When I did the bad thing I took the hit.

One of these was shorting +15v (IIRC) to Init L on the Unibus on an
11/780.  Blew the bits off all the boards back to the Unibus termination on
the DW780
and out to the M9302 Unibus terminator.

Spent the next two days rebuilding the box.
I still had a great relationship with the customer for the next 4 years at
the site.

People understand mistakes and will forgive.  Lying to a customer to keep
up a corporate image will never be forgotten if you get caught.

I remember stealing HDA's off of brand new RA81's at DEC's Princeton HQ to
get them out to customer sites before failures in the field from the glue
liquification issue.
Customers will stand by a company that puts them first and delivers serious
effort.
Nowadays the outsourced techs are pretty much parts carriers and swappers
with no ability to push company deliveries up and often they act as a
delaying action until the
company can deliver the correct services.

Bill


--
  d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN.  Don't you wish you could still buy it now!
 pechter-at-gmail.com


On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 7:05 PM Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:

> On 08/29/2018 04:21 PM, William Pechter wrote:
> > Did that one at Johnson and Johnson Health Care Systems around '95 as an
> > IBM Global Services guy.  Ran to the computer room to restart services
> > and Oracle on AIX.
>
> @^*% happens.
>
> Anybody that tells you it doesn't happen to them is lying.
>
> > Apologized to the customer.  IBM demanded a formal Root Cause Analysis
> > for the fat finger with recommendations for avoiding the problem in
> > the future.  I proposed redesigned ascii keyboards where Q and 1 weren't
> > adjacent.
>
> I remember things like that.
>
> I always liked to admit things like that to the customer.  I felt that
> it fostered trust.  More than once I went to a customer that trusted me
> and told them that something was not me and they took me at my word,
> primarily because of that established trust.
>
> > Management suits not amused.  Customer took it as simple accident and
> > dealt with the 5-10 minute outage.
>
> Nice.
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>
>
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