Who, Me? Opinion varies about the most efficient way to commence a working week. The Register’s contribution to that conversation is Who, Me? It’s the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of your mistakes, and subsequent escapes.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Leo” who shared a story from the early 1990s, when he provided network and software support for a speciality vehicle manufacturer that ran both a mainframe and an AS/400 midrange machine.
Just one member of the IT department was trained to use the AS/400, but the rest of the small tech team helped each other out because some jobs ran overnight and someone needed to be awake to log on from home by modem to get them going. Sometimes those jobs failed, but competition for time on the AS/400 was fierc…
Who, Me? Opinion varies about the most efficient way to commence a working week. The Register’s contribution to that conversation is Who, Me? It’s the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of your mistakes, and subsequent escapes.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Leo” who shared a story from the early 1990s, when he provided network and software support for a speciality vehicle manufacturer that ran both a mainframe and an AS/400 midrange machine.
Just one member of the IT department was trained to use the AS/400, but the rest of the small tech team helped each other out because some jobs ran overnight and someone needed to be awake to log on from home by modem to get them going. Sometimes those jobs failed, but competition for time on the AS/400 was fierce so it was worth the attempt.
This arrangement relied on colleagues in the office completing other jobs by an agreed time, so Leo and his colleagues didn’t have to wait deep into the wee hours.
One night, that system broke down and Leo found himself unable to access the processing queue he’d been told to use.
Eventually he spotted an empty queue and, despite knowing it wasn’t the right resource, decided to use it.
Half a heartbeat later, the job finished.
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The point of this late-night login regime was to run workloads through the wee hours when nobody else was around. Leo therefore assumed the sudden conclusion of the job indicated an error and called his supervisor to confess and ask how to restart the job.
“My supervisor was flabbergasted, not by what I thought was an error or how quickly the job ran, but because it had never occurred to her or anyone else to use that queue, which had the highest priority of all queues,” Leo told Who, Me?
The supervisor decided Leo was onto something, and from that night on standard procedure changed to use the high priority queue.
Leo’s mistake therefore meant that whoever was left to do the late night log-ons could see if the job worked, and run it again if necessary. Now, the night shift even had time to verify the output of the job, and close files so backup systems could do their thing overnight.
The company therefore emerged more efficient and resilient.
“My error, if it can be called an error, was a godsend in disguise for the company and for our small I.T. staff,” Leo concluded.
Have you made a mistake that turned out to be a positive? One positive step action isclicking here to send your story to Who, Me? We could use a story or two to keep the column popping across the festive season. ®