What's YOUR biggest mess??

[Rustward]

Maybe the biggest mess I ever made was entering "$PJ1-9999" on a system console (JES2) sometime around 1979 or 1980.

If nobody knows what that does, I'll post an update with the results of that command after a while.

 

[MRG]

P is stop(?), not sure how much got ended. Do want to hear the results. Ouch.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Early Retirement Forum mobile app

 

[poorcarver]

In a career in heavy industry I have a lot of stories. My personal favorite mess that I observed but did not do was associated with a turkey fryer. When those items were relatively new my BIL (whom I do not care for as he has advanced smart a*s disease) bought one. My DW and I showed up and one of the SIL's came up to me and said to go outside that both BIL's were there with said fryer and she was scared they would burn down the house. So out I go. It was around 30 degrees out and getting dark. As I walk up to the two perps I notice heat waves shimmering above the vat of oil. Hmm. So I greet them and ask what is happening. The bright one says we are waiting for the oil to heat and it must be the cold but it is taking forever for the oil to get hot, look the thermometer just now says 220 or so and we need it to be 350 (or whatever it was). I look and the oil is seething and the thermometer is not touching the oil it is a good inch above the surface.

So I say so do you guys know what the vaporization point of cooking oil is and do you know what happens when this oil flashes over? I am saying this as I am walking back away from the whole future disaster. Bright boy points out that the oil is not even 300 degrees and I point out that the thermometer is not in the oil. Whereupon one of them shoved it down into the oil and sure enough, that oil is about 500 or so. So the next question they ask is so now what? As I am about to say turn off the flame before this whole thing goes up, bam up she goes. Wonderful. I was hoping that the garage would go but they were outside. The neighbor called the FD and a fine was issued and a good time was had generally. So the bird went in the oven and we ate really late.

 

[LoneAspen]

Maybe the biggest mess I ever made was entering "$PJ1-9999" on a system console (JES2) sometime around 1979 or 1980.

If nobody knows what that does, I'll post an update with the results of that command after a while.

It sounds equally as disastrous as coding "DISP=(MOD,DELETE,DELETE)" in some JCL to delete a dataset. But then after running it, realizing you put it on the wrong DD statement, and wiping out several months of Purchasing/Receiving data.

Not that I ever did anything like that

 

[tryan]

oh how could i forget dry sanding an 800 sq ft room after 2 mud coats ... opened the doors and windows in the room and THOUGHT I had upstairs sealed off. Sanded for 8 hours with a palm sanded. Went upstairs only to see a fog/cloud of dust.

Spent the next 2 days cleaning EVERY SQ INCH of a 2500 sq ft home. Still finding spots I missed.

 

[Rustward]

P is stop(?), not sure how much got ended. Do want to hear the results. Ouch.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Early Retirement Forum mobile app

$ is the default JES2 subsystem command prefix. P means something different to JES2.

 

[Rustward]

It sounds equally as disastrous as coding "DISP=(MOD,DELETE,DELETE)" in some JCL to delete a dataset. But then after running it, realizing you put it on the wrong DD statement, and wiping out several months of Purchasing/Receiving data.

Not that I ever did anything like that

With the proper backups this should be little more than a minor inconvenience.

One should always assume that any disk file is subject to never being readable again.

 

[davemartin88]

We had a large 10 gallon (maybe larger) glass bottle used for a water dispenser that we had used to collect our change. One day, I needed a dime and when I turned the bottle on it's side to pour out some of the change, the bottle broke. Took a long time to separate the coins from the glass and clean up. The good news is we ended up with over $500 once we turned in all the coins. I now save change in a much smaller jar!

 

[imoldernu]

2weeks ago -Two pounds rice spilled from top shelf in pantry... still cleaning up.

1965 - Won a microwave oven when folks didn't know too much about them. In demo to DW put 6 in eggs (shells on). Opened door. They exploded. All of kitchen, and much of dining room, ceiling to floor. Brought DW to hospital (hit in eye with egg particles) for removal and wearing a patch for a week.

1957 - Brewing booze in many, many bottles and jugs in the attic of the fraternity. Three AM explosion which destroyed every single bottle and the ceilings in three rooms.

1935 - 3rd grade Honorary Inkwell Filler for the week... Overfilled Isabell Miller's inkwell... ran down desk and all over her dress, socks and shoes. So much for honor.

 

[Walt34]

Thankfully he had shut his bedroom door so I wouldn't catch him - which is exactly what made me suspicious.

Ah, so that's how they knew. A couple of cousins and I were for a time convinced that our mothers had eyes in the backs of their heads because they always knew when we were doing something we shouldn't.

 

[Rustward]

It sounds equally as disastrous as coding "DISP=(MOD,DELETE,DELETE)" in some JCL to delete a dataset. But then after running it, realizing you put it on the wrong DD statement, and wiping out several months of Purchasing/Receiving data.

Not that I ever did anything like that

Probably the wrong forum for this, but maybe a few can appreciate it.
About 35 years ago we had a staff meeting interrupted in the middle of the afternoon by a noob systems programmer who came in and said, very sheepishly, "I believe I just deleted SYS1.PROCLIB" -- it may have been SYS1.PARMLIB -- too long ago to remember. These datasets are required to start the operating system, and as long as they are not overwritten (even if deleted) the system will run just fine. These get allocated soon after IPL and remain allocated until the next IPL, so things continued to run fine, but if we had an unscheduled IPL, we would have been in pretty deep weeds. One of the old farts in the room muttered something about the VTOC listings he had us run every day, for which we never understood the reason, followed by a muttering of "ABSTR" (which means Absolute Track Address)-- this is a report that contains the track addresses of every data set on the disk volumes. I glanced across the table at Bill mouthing ABSTR, and we flew out of our chairs. We reallocated that dataset using Absolute Track Addressing using the VTOC report the old-timer told us we would someday need. All the old data was still there. We didn't get anything close to hero status, but we did avoid a potentially long and painful computer outage for the whole company.

 

[MRG]

Sweet.
Did the noob survive?

It's amazing what really motivated people can do. Can you imagine the fallout if the attempts failed. (or no one had the foresite to run the VTOC report)? "We have your data, we just don't know where it is!"

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Early Retirement Forum mobile app

 

[Rustward]

Sweet.
Did the noob survive?

It's amazing what really motivated people can do. Can you imagine the fallout if the attempts failed. (or no one had the foresite to run the VTOC report)? "We have your data, we just don't know where it is!"

After a short string of similar incidents he decided he didn't like being a systems programmer and moved back to the bay area as an applications programmer at Sun -- the company that put the dot in dot.com. Sun Microsystems "The Dot" TV commercial (2000) - YouTube Funny -- the dot was actually a bubble that . . .

The company was pretty lenient but they did fire an operator who pulled the EPO switch when the CE told him to power down the machine for maintenance.

 

[LoneAspen]

Probably the wrong forum for this, but maybe a few can appreciate it.
About 35 years ago we had a staff meeting interrupted in the middle of the afternoon by a noob systems programmer who came in and said, very sheepishly, "I believe I just deleted SYS1.PROCLIB" -- it may have been SYS1.PARMLIB -- too long ago to remember...

Reminds me of when I worked for HP in the mid 90's and we had to take a trip to one of their facilities in California. In the data center was an old HP 1000/RTE realtime computer they still used to run some of their systems (facilities systems I think).

We were all gawking at it one day, we'd never seen anything like it before, at least still running in production. I remember it had a punch tape reader on it, but I don't think they used that anymore. There was a large rack of tape reels against the wall, and it also had some disk packs (mag packs? I forget the exact terminology, it was a little before my time) attached to it.

It was humming along just fine until one day...

We were in there setting up some racks of servers for a Windows NT installation, and one of our guys had a raised floor tile removed (one of the few times I remember seeing a raised floor data center in California), and he accidentally kicked a connector loose from one of the disk packs, and didn't notice at first.

Later, some sys admins rushed in in a panic. Evidently, we had crashed it hard, the guy who knew the most about it had retired, and it had run so long without incident, nobody else knew much about it.

The next day, they had brought the retired guy in to help out, and he was PISSED. The guy who knocked out the cable apologized, but the guy ripped him a new one. I guess they got everything running again later in the day.

Our last day there, we noticed one of our NT servers was having problems, and when we started checking things out, found some of the Fibre Channel cables had been unplugged between the server and the SAN switch. Payback I guess, but we never found out for sure.

 

[kimcdougc]

My DS poured olive oil down the driveway at our house. (He was 12 years old, way old enough to know better). This was the summer in Atlanta, 95 degrees outside. My DH tried everything to remove it, muriatic acid, every chemical out there. That driveway smelled like french fries everyday it was warm. It still smelled like that when we moved 2 years later.