Field Support Chap Got Married – Which Took Down A Mainframe

Who, Me? Reg readers are so dedicated it seems some of you are married to the job, although you also admit that no relationship is perfect when you send stories to Who, Me? It's the column in which we share your tales of making massive mistakes and somehow staying together with your employer afterwords.

This week, meet "Zeke" who told us about his time as a field engineer for a data communications company.

I am still embarrassed 45 years later because someone else had to clean up my mess

"The job involved installing and repairing business modems and other comms gear in large banks, insurance companies, etc," Zeke told Who, Me?

His career was moving along nicely. "I had worked my way up to district tech support and was on my way to a regional position," he wrote.

One day, Zeke's employer dispatched him to a major department store operator.

"Their comms system had lost communications with their mainframe," he told Who, Me? "To isolate the problem, which was not easily identifiable, I had to remove and replace each of five comms circuit cards."

The retailer would not let Zeke conduct that investigation with the power off, because it needed various systems to continue operating.

"I had removed and replaced the suspect cards one by one without success, and was now looking for a problem on the backplane – perhaps the bent or broken pins that were not uncommon in this system – when I noticed a very slight spark," Zeke told Who, Me?

The brief and small discharge had no apparent effect on the machine, so Zeke ignored it in the hope it was nothing to worry about.

He was wrong.

"After replacing some cards, and reseating them all, the entire system had come down," he confessed to Who, Me?

He soon figured out what had happened.

"While perusing the machine, my recently acquired wedding ring had hit some pins and short-circuited the backplane, destroying almost all of the cards."

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Zeke didn't have the parts needed to repair the system and told us he was "so embarrassed about what I had done that I couldn't bring myself to tell the customer what had happened."

He instead contacted a colleague who came and fixed things up.

"Forty-five years later, I am still embarrassed about that job; not only about trashing the customer's system, but also because someone else had to clean up my mess," he told Who, Me? "I never wore my ring at work again," he added.

Has your jewellery or clothing caused a computational or comms crisis? If so, click here to send us an email so we can share your story in a future instalment of Who, Me? ®