Friday, March 29, 2024
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Pranks have little room in IT

Hmmm … had to be back in my programming days when I would receive data tapes (from hospitals) and had to offload all the data onto a CD Jukebox device, which was “bleeding edge” tech @ that time (another story).

I was trying to download data from an important client and could not get anything off the tape. To make a long story short, we asked for 3 different sets of tapes from the client and each time they were blank.

Needless to say, things became tense between our company and the client hospital. They insisted the tapes had something on it and we insisted they didn’t. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any diagnostics we could run on the machine. We couldn’t try an old tape because it was automated to pull and instantly load the data onto the CD Jukebox.

Then one of the other programmers returned from a 2 week “emergency” vacation (a family member died). While we were having a staff meeting, discussing this issue, a small “uh oh” came from him. He then pulled me out of the office, walked me over to the tape machine and showed me a piece of “tape” he placed over the reader head … as a prank.

Fortunately, he was the one who had to explain the prank and not me. We apologized to the client and told them we had equipment failure, but it was now resolved.

However, up to this point in time … I was in the hot seat!

via: [Spiceworks Community]

Picture Source: [Mrs. Gemstone (CC)]

 

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