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Sometimes one can go a little too far in search of isolation
Trapped between two screens. Forever borked
Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in The Register's surprisingly long-lived series of Borks and bugs from the UK, Europe and beyond.
Today's Bork is an entirely different beast to the BSODs and plaintive error messages of recent times. The computer in question here is just fine and dandy but as Register reader Mat observed "it clearly hasn't been... ahem... debugged in a long while."
Indeed, an unfortunate moth has got itself trapped between the outer and inner screens and, bereft of tech conference swag to munch through or the odd bit of flower nectar, appears to have sadly expired under the stern gaze of the pictured technician and her test tube.
While the word "bug" has long been part of technical jargon and handy when trying to explain to a layperson that a problem exists without saying something unhelpful like "argh, there is an arse-swooping cock-up of catastrophic proportions in the system", many think of the great Grace Hopper and the moth discovered in the mechanical relays of the Harvard Mark II computer.
While Hopper never laid claim to originating the term, pasting the unfortunate creature into a logbook with the aid of sticky tape certainly popularised the word in the computing lexicon.
As for this ATM, located in lower Piedmont, Italy, "the machine is working just fine (spilled out the €'s I needed)," said Mat, who spotted the fluttering fail while on a mission to grab some cash.
Mat also shared a little on the current situation in his corner of Italy, telling us that "things are going well... It's just that it is veeeery slow. Major outbreak == major containment measures."
"It's not easy," he added, "but we'll manage."
While the restrictions on freedom of movement were, he acknowledged, "a bit of a pain in the neck," he added that he thought it "the right thing to do."
Still, "banks and ATMs work fine," he said brightly. Sadly this is not the case for the moth trapped within. ®