Some memories that came back to me recently occurred in one of the largest insurance accounts whose offices were in Holborn. It was a large sprawling set of buildings with a big imposing facade opposite the Daily Mirror building. The installation was across several floors with multiple CPUs on one floor and the IO spread across another couple of floors. One of the attractions of working at this account was they had a very good staff canteen and we were allowed the privilege of eating there. I cannot remember whether it was free or just cheap and good value/quality. The upshot of this was that any CE working in the proximity used to sneak round there for lunch. Most days you would find a table with 3 or more IBM engineers enjoying a good lunch and sharing the trials and tribulations of their day.
This all went horribly wrong when on one day the system crashed and the customer rang in with a severity one call, that is system down and very urgent. They were told that all the CEs were tied up on other Sev 1s and would be some time. They called again some time later and were told the same story as call despatch were in fact having trouble contacting any CEs at all. The customers DP manager decided to get some lunch and await the outcome of his urgent calls to IBM. When he walked in to the canteen he saw a table with several CEs having a relaxed lunch and immediately grabbed his account engineer who was at the table and dragged him of to the computer room. Needless to say the outcome was that our managers had a few strong words with the CEs and we were told to no longer abuse this customers generosity.
The second incident was in the same account when the customer had decided to install a large volume of dumb screens all over the building. In those days all the cable work for this sort of network was chargeable work and not part of any maintenance contract etc. The customer decided they could get it done cheaper than the IBM price and went ahead with their install plan and contractor. They had a few problems and one of the policies at that time was active non co-operation to sort out customers OEM contractors shoddy work. The idea being to reinforce the benefits of using big blue end to end. The account sales team did not appreciate this approach as they could see that if CE co-operated we would get more kit ordered etc.
There were a few of us on site one day when the salesman rushed in to the engineers room to say they had yet another cabling problem and would we help. One of the guys went and had a look and told him that it needed the connector soldered on to a cable to fix this problem. The salesman asked if we would do this and got a very firm ‘NO’ and told to get the contractor to sort it. He then asked if he could borrow one of our soldering irons to do it himself. We all thought this a rare precedent for sales to get their hands dirty so lent him one that was lying about on the bench. He then decided to bring the cable in to the engineers room to carry out this operation and also I think in the forlorn hope we would take over. His moment of glory came when he slammed the soldering iron plug in to the socket and there was a huge flash and the whole computer suite powered down. This was caused by the fact that the iron had a universal plug on it which meant it could be plugged in to all sort of sockets as there was no standard at this time. It had 13A square pins, 5A and 15A round pins and some european pins as well but it had to be very carefully set up before plugging in to a wall socket. What made it worse in this case was the insurance company had metal 13A wall sockets with the inverted plastic insulated ‘T’ so that when he slammed it in to the wall the round pins were thrown forward and made contact with the earthed steel face and thus the blinding flash.
The look on the sales guys face was a picture as mayhem broke out outside in the computer suite and this was further enhanced by the account CE asking him if he would tell them who did it or did he need the engineers to tell them. He confessed to the DP manager and we then set about bringing the system back up, resetting trips and replacing a few blown fuses, power cards etc. The cost to the customer and us was far more than the saving on the cabling contract plus some. The other outcome was that shortly after this the universal plugs were banned on safety grounds and we had to use adaptors instead.
