Stupid Things I Have Heard At Work Part Deux 4

[AnotherHiggins]

OK, I'll start.

A Former supervisor at my company (thankfully I never reported to her) raised Jack Russell Terriers. She was discussing it with a group of us in the office. Someone asked her what the tails look like before folks lop them off. She said that the tails were often short or malformed. She went on to explain how one day they would be born without the tails.

I must have given her a strange look, because she cocked her head to one side and said to me in a supremely condescending tone, “It’s called evolution, John.”

I laughed out loud. I thought she was kidding.

She went on, “We keep cutting their tails off before they breed, so eventually they won’t even be born with tails.”

I couldn’t believe it, but the group actually started debating whether this made sense, with only a couple of us dissenting. I tried to explain that evolution can occur because of mutation, but not mutilation, that the tails were malformed because Jack Russells simply aren’t bred for nice tails so dogs with ugly tails but other desirable characteristics were allowed to breed.

She didn’t get it.

I ended the discussion by asking the supervisor if her ears were pierced. She confirmed that they were. I asked how many generations of ear-pierced women it would take before their daughters started being born with holes in their ears.
____
NOTE: I do not wish to spark a debate about evolution. Dogs are bred for certain characteristics, that’s all I'm talking about.

[tt]_____
[blue]-John[/blue][/tt]

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[SamBones]

I was just limiting my response to PCs since GwydionM mentioned an 'A' drive. That kind of spells out IBM PC (Insufficient But Marketable Piece of C**p).

Drum disk drives, massive removable disk packs capable of holding multiple megabytes (*gasp*), punched cards (chaff wars), paper tape (more chaff wars), teletypes with acoustic couplers, reel to reel tape drives with vacuum tubes to take up the tape slack, etc, etc, etc. Been there, done that! Anyone ever play ring toss with the write protect rings?

I have worked on machines with core memory, but I'm definitely post vacuum tube!

 

[SamBones]

Ever have someone drop your deck and feel like killing them? Ever drop your own deck and feel like committing suicide? Ever spend hours standing at "the desk" waiting for your deck and a listing to come back?

Anyone here NOT know what a diagonal line drawn across the top of your card deck was for?

Heh heh, this is fun!

 

[BJCooperIT]

Ever had an operator swap handfuls of cards while loading the card hopper and have your ASSEMBLER program clean compile anyway?

What about the rubberband wars and the wad of rubberbands around your car's stickshift?

Printers that played "songs"?

Yep, I remember 3:00am testing because the computer's time was more valuable than a programmer's time!

[sup]Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.[/sup][sup] ~George Bernard Shaw[/sup]
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[CajunCenturion]

Brings back memories. I started in the late 60's on an IBM 1130.

This thread has morphed from stupid stories to fond memories (well not all are so fond!).

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[PaulTEG]

The VAX, and I don't mean vaccuum, stil, not yesterday.

Spend an hour a week on CPAN, helps cure all known programming ailments ;-)

 

[SantaMufasa]

Ah, memories. Besides several boxes of unpunched, virgin 80-column punch cards, I still have out in the garage a "cake pan" 8-layered spindle disk drive that held (on the total of its 16-inch-diameter 8 layers) an amazing 64 megabytes! The "cake pan" ran on an IBM-360/30 that (along with the other drives, the CPU, the IBM 1403 continuous-sheet chain printer, the tape drives, and the only device capable of mass input from humans: the infamous 80-column punch-card reader) occupied the entire computer room.

I had to go on humiliating bended knee to the Board of Directors with a proposal to upgrade the CPU from 32K of RAM to a remarkable 64K of memory just so that we could run ANSI-standard COBOL instead of the Waterloo-University subset.

Later, I was the first in my neighborhood to own my own computer: a Digital Systems Z-80 CP/M o/s with an amazing 64K of RAM and 2 drives (A: & B to read/write 8-inch (very) floppy 128KB diskettes.

One time, I had the lid off of the machine for vacuuming, exposing the motherboard. I had to leave the room for a couple of minutes. While out of the room, I heard some hammering going on in the back end of the house. My curiosity got the best of me and I went to investigate. As I entered my home office, I saw my then-18-month-old (now 29-year-old son sitting INSIDE the open-lidded computer, hammering on the chips of the motherboard!!!

Losing it, I hollered, "James David Hunt, what are you doing!!!"

His simple, honest answer: "Woaking on duh 'putuh."

Well, duh...Going about his father's work...I should'a known.

Mufasa
(aka Dave of Sandy, Utah, USA)
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[tsdragon]

Yup. I remember punched cards and mag tape reels too. Anyone ever had to manually "program" a card sorter with those jumper wires? I still have a printout of one of my jobs where the printer chaing had apparently slipped more than a few positions. None of it is readable except the banner page, because it had large block letters "printed" with rows and columns of normal characters. I probably still have a few read/write rings from the tape reels lying around too.

One of my least favorite parts was IBM JCL. It was like learning another programming language just to run your programs. I still can't type DNS without it coming out DSN.

My first personal computer was a TI-44A with a cassette tape recorder for storage.

Amazing how far we've come, isn't it?



Tracy Dryden

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons,
For you are crunchy, and good with mustard.

 

[grande]

I feel so inadequately young :-(

My first computer was a 386, with Windows 3.1. I first did programming on a 133 Mhz Pentium with Windows 95, in QBasic.

Unfortunately, I've taken a step backwards. I'm doing Cobol programming on an OS/390 mainframe. And tsdragon, I assure you, I most definitely feel your pain when it comes to JCL. I swear, I spend more time writing JCLs than Cobol Apps.

-------------------------
Just call me Captain Awesome.

 

[2ffat]

While this may not be the stupidest thing I heard, it may have given eavesdroppers a bit of a startle when they heard it.

Back when I was using Xenix and Unix, we had a kill command for processes that wouldn't/couldn't be stopped normally. More than once, I got calls from people saying, "Kill me!"



James P. Cottingham
-----------------------------------------
[sup]I'm number 1,229!
I'm number 1,229![/sup]

 

[MadMichael]

An IBM 360 memory -- my all-time favorite warning label, in the system console (a Selectric typewriter mechanism): Keep personal articles (jewelry, hair, fingers) out of this area.

For the truly nostalgic: you can find actual core memory cards for sale on eBay...

 

[tsdragon]

Grande: How did you manage to go backward into cobol and jcl? I definitely feel for you. I think I'd rather go back to doing night audit at a hotel than go back to coding cobol and jcl again.

I've think I finally threw them away, but I used to have half a dozen IBM technical manuals (System 370 Principles of Operations, etc.) Better than Ambien and alcohol if you can't sleep. I also used to do ALC (Assembler) programming on 360 and 370 machines. Finally went to PL/I and thought I'd gone to heaven.

Tracy Dryden

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons,
For you are crunchy, and good with mustard.

 

[CajunCenturion]

I remember having to learn and use JCL on the IBM 360 at Chapel Hill many years ago, and via a trunk, the IBM 370 at TUCC. It was the best of both worlds - a JCL preamble to a PL/I program.

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[DataDog]

One of the neatest aspects of Core Memory was: Unlike the RAM of today, you could turn off the computer (hit the 'BRS' (Big Red Switch) and the Core retained the program/data that it had before shutting down. Power the computer back up, hit 'continue' and you're back in business, WITHOUT rebooting!

Other memories: Turning off the lights, opening the bay doors of the computer(A/N FSQ-7), and doing the PM (looking for cold/weak vacuum tube filaments.)

DataDog
'Failure Is Not An Option'

 

[grande]

Tracy - I went backwards by getting a co-op job at a bank :-(

-------------------------
Just call me Captain Awesome.

 

[SamBones]

2ffat

About the unix [tt]kill[/tt] command. I've had several completely harmless conversations about unix process control that have raised some eyebrows...

Op: "I'm having trouble killing the child process. It won't die."
Me: "Try killing the parent, sometimes that will cause the child to die. If not, try killing the child after the parent is dead.

 

[GwydionM]

Regarding overheard conversations, I was sitting opposite someone giving a few hints about progressing in a game called Secret of Monkey Island, pirates and vodoo stuff. I quickly realised what they were on about, but it is definitely a schenario that a comedy program could use.

Regarding punched cards, I was taught to draw a diagonal line across the deck. That was back in the 1970s. I remember attending a talk about the first IBM PC, which was not highly regarded. It was many more years before I actually used one; I was mostly on mainframes.

------------------------------
An old man who lives in the UK

 

[sleipnir214]

Speaking of killing processes...

A fraternity brother of mine went to college on a AFROTC scholarship and after graduating spent some time in the Air Force, most of it at the Pentagon, running their MULTICS systems.

My friend, then a lieutenant, got a call one afternoon from a major, asking why the server was so slow. My friend reported that he could see no reason why, as the system daemon was the only thing eating up any significant processor ticks. The major told my friend to kill the system daemon, and when my friend objected, trying to point out that on a MULTICS system the system daemon was the core of the OS and that MULTICS could not run without it, the major interrupted with the words, "That's an order, Lieutenant."

My friend dutifully killed the system daemon. And immediately forwarded all calls on his sysadmin phone to the major's extension.

The story goes on predictably from there, with the major trying to invoke higher authorities to be my friend in trouble, only to have all these higher authorities come down on the major when everyone knew all the facts.

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TANSTAAFL!!

 

[SilentAiche]

Thread-wise, perhaps this is close enough, given the 180-degree nature of it (apologies, John):

Coworker: [red]Can I ask you a question?[/red]

Me: [red]You just did. You should have asked for two.[/red]

Tim

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[NewToCR]

SamBones,
you people are sick!!! LOL

 

[BJCooperIT]

A suspicious package was found at the courthouse this morning. The local television station had a brilliant idea. Why not use the traffic reporter in the helicopter as a news reporter since he had a bird's eye view of the scene? I can think of at least one reason not to use him. After the all clear was sounded, he reported:

Nothing unsafe was not found!

Does that mean the courthouse could still blow up?

[sup]Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.[/sup][sup] ~George Bernard Shaw[/sup]
Consultant Developer/Analyst Oracle, Forms, Reports & PL/SQL (Windows)
My website: Emu Products Plus