Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Fake it till you make it doesn't cut it for mission-critical workloads

Who, Me? One of the joys of Monday mornings is arriving at work to find messes made over the weekend. The other is reading a new edition of Who, Me? It's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of somehow recovering from failure.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Serge," who, when he was just 16 years old, scored an amazing job: Working the night shift at a mainframe-for-hire company, alongside one of his friends.

"Our task mainly consisted of staying for the evening after the day staff had left, and running jobs that picked up data from the company's clients in other time zones," Serge told Who, Me?

Serge told us he and his friend worked with a DECwriter II, which he described as "a sort of printer with a keyboard attached, and no video monitor." A quick glance at The Centre for Computing History's entry for the device shows Serge's memory remains accurate.

"We would type commands using the keyboard, and the computer at some remote location would send back the output to our commands, on paper," Serge explained.

That meant the system produced a literal paper trail, which their boss liked to review in the morning.

As you would when employing teenagers.

On busy nights, the DECwriter would exhaust its supply of paper. The boys were therefore shown the supplies store so they could feed the beast.

This system worked well until it didn't. One fateful night, Serge's pal forgot to get extra paper, panicked, and started shoving anything faintly paper-related into the machine – including cardboard.

The output was predictably dire, and Serge's pal fled the scene, leaving the mess he'd made for the day shift to clean up.

Which is how Serge found himself the only teenage mainframe wrangler at the company.

Serge tried to stay on the straight and narrow, but one evening a client called to request an extra item of data be included in an overnight job. Serge promised he'd sort that out, then forgot to do it.

"By the time I remembered, the last job had already been sent and it was already late in the evening," he confessed. "One option was to re-run the job and let it pick up the one record, which at 1,200 baud would take another hour."

The other option was to "abort the job, edit the file to add the missing record to the bottom, and then put it back in the run queue."

Serge thought he could pull this off, except for one small problem: Each record had a unique identifier. By this time, Serge had run enough jobs that he'd seen those identifiers followed a pattern that was almost sequential.

"I faked one," he admitted. "And naturally, all my work, including the clandestine bits, were recorded for posterity on the paper trail." The next day, Serge's boss and another even more senior manager greeted him.

"The only thing that prevented me from running for the door or bursting into tears was that the latter had a bit of a gleam in his eye, and a smirk on his face." He took that as a good sign and sat down demurely.

"Did you do this?" asked the senior manager.

Serge admitted he had done so.

"That was clever," came the reply. "But don't do that again."

Serge promised not to and kept his job.

Have you hired kids and regretted it? If you have a good story about this sort of thing, don't regret holding onto it and click here to send an email to Who, Me? We love reading your tales and hope to feature many more on future Mondays. ®