Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

An early career lesson in the power of documentation, and the importance of exploration

Who, Me? The Register has very few rules, but one we always observe on a Monday morning is to present a new installment of Who, Me? – the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of breaking the rules, without breaking your career in the process.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Benedict" who shared the story of the summer internship he endured many years ago.

"I worked at a big corporation running on mainframes, in the stone age when using a computer meant writing jobs on punched cards and submitting them to be executed," Benedict reminisced. "Our usual job involved working on source files with a batch editor which interleaved commands to skip, modify, insert, and delete new lines into our program."

Then as now, interns tried to impress their temporary employers in the hope of landing a job offer.

Benedict therefore read IBM's documentation for the batch editor and, in a fit of youthful enthusiasm and hubris, decided he could improve it.

"I wrote some clever commands, probably something like a search and replace which was pretty spiffy back then," he wrote.

But Benedict didn't know that some of the full-time staff had already modified the behavior of the batch editor with custom extensions. His code therefore overwrote many files.

"The manual didn't say that could happen," Benedict said. "And there was no manual for the extensions."

Despite this error not being entirely Benedict's fault, his summer employer banned him from using the batch editor, which rather put a dampener on the internship.

He nonetheless persisted with attempts at proactivity by doing things like loading and unloading tapes, and typing simple commands into the mainframe console to prepare it for real jobs.

"When they noticed that, they were horrified at the magnitude of risk I posed, and banned me from that too," he lamented.

But then he looked at the upside.

"They were still paying me and the summer was glorious," Benedict told Who, Me? "And at the exit interview before I went back to school, the manager said I had finished more tasks than they expected."

Benedict never worked for this very large company again but does celebrate what he learned from it.

"The experience did not cure me from adventurous programming, fortunately," he told Who, Me?

What did you break, or almost break, as an intern? Click here to send us an email so we can share your story in a future edition of Who, Me? ®