Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it
Big Blue turned the air blue
Who, Me? Oh, bother, it's Monday. But rather than curse about another working week rolling around, The Register welcomes it with another instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you confess to workplace whoopsies and reveal how you survived them.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Saul" who shared a story from his time working for an IBM dealer in the late 1980s.
"I'd taught myself how to use a PC/DOS and got the job because I knew more about PCs than the hiring manager or the team lead," Saul told Who, Me? On his first day at the coal face, his boss asked him to learn something new: UNIX.
Saul welcomed that suggestion and over the next six months became so proficient in IBM's AIX he built what he described as "a fairly not bad, multi-user, fault reporting system with Informix."
That feat earned him extra responsibilities helping the IBM dealer's pre-sales team, plus work building and installing customer systems.
While Saul enjoyed exploring and working with AIX, the PC's rise and rise was by then inexorable.
"Before long, I was introduced to a new piece of software called AADU – AIX Access for DOS Users," Saul explained. "It was a VT100 terminal emulator and filesystem share tool, and pretty cool for its time.”
Saul liked this software, so he decided to explore it thoroughly by using Norton Utilities to inspect its executable to see if he could find anything interesting.
That effort didn't produce anything of note, save a list of the program's error messages.
One of which was "S*x feels so f***ing good, I just can't stop."
- Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe
- Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery
- After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'
- Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league
Saul tried in vain to trigger that error message, without luck.
A few weeks later, his IBM contact came to visit for a regular education/troubleshooting visit.
"I could hardly wait to show him what I'd found," Saul wrote. "When he saw it, he went white as a sheet, made his excuses and left."
Saul though that was a little odd, as this IBM chap usually had a good sense of humor.
It turned out that IBM saw this as no laughing matter.
"The following week I received a most sincere letter of apology from the CEO of IBM himself, telling me how sorry he was I had to experience such a thing."
Saul mostly shrugged it off – he just thought it was funny, although he worried about two things.
One was whether anyone at IBM lost their job because of his discovery.
The other was that despite his efforts, he never did manage to trigger the error!
Have you written or found code or comments that got someone in trouble? Click here to reveal all by sending your story to Who, Me? ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
