who me Welcome to an episode of Who, Me? in which a race between office chairs results in an unexpected escalation rather than the lifting of a trophy.
Our story takes place in the 1990s and our hero, who we’ll call “Ben” (because that’s not his name) was part of a group tasked with servicing the needs of a VAX 11/785 that was ‘hid in the depths of a bunker. .
The VAX 11/780 range appeared in 1977, and the 11/785 was introduced in 1984. Popular stuff for the time, but now relatively old and in need of 24/7 pampering by teams from sysops. “His only job,” Ben told us, “was to run a program associated with national defense.”
“Many sysops had burn marks from the main PSU on the saturated core loading 8″ floppies into the PDP 11 boot computer,” he continued. “Many had hit. [so many] spells on the console’s teletype that most of the letters were no longer visible.”
The pay was good, but the work (mainly cleaning tape drives, running backups, and performing system integrity checks) was deadly boring. Off-site materials were not allowed in the computer lab, meaning the team had to make do with what was there. “There was a lot of Minesweeper and Patience played,” Ben confided.
And then there were the chairs. Chairs on wheels. So, of course, a chair racing league was started. These things are mandatory, right?
“Naturally,” said Ben, “the course was through the clean, air-conditioned computer room, as the hard floor allowed for a high-speed section on the course.”
All went well, and long shifts in the company of the VAX were broken up by high-speed circuits as the technicians tried to climb the league leaderboard.
Until the inevitable happened.
“One night,” Ben said, “in a desperate attempt to take the last lap, one of the sysops attempted a slingshot maneuver using a support pillar in the computer room.”
“The pillar had one notable feature. The room’s emergency stop button.”
Almost immediately there was silence. Everything turned back in a span of five seconds. There was no air conditioning, no fans, nothing. “You could almost hear 11/785 sigh with relief,” Ben said.
“Then the red phones started ringing…”
“And the defcon lamppost went up a level.”
Concerned readers should be reassured that this happened long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Peace reigned and, Ben told us, the color change on the defcon pole simply meant that something had happened and was being investigated.
The stop itself was recorded as an accident, but not as the result of a cunning chair racing maneuver. “Some vague details about the inclination to complete a checklist were entered into the incident log.”
Bosses admonished the sysops with a warning that more care was needed, before praising them for getting everything back online.
A week later a cover was added to the stop button. And the chair racing league? Scrapping: Suddenly, it seemed like thumbing between tape changes wasn’t so bad after all.
has someone no Tempted to do a little sneaky skating when presented with a wheelchair? What was the result? A sudden silence or a catastrophic accident? Confess all with an email to Who, Me? ®