On a lighter note it was in this same customer that a few of us returned after a very liquid lunch time celebrating the impending nuptials of one of our team. One of our group was incapable of walking unaided and was also fairly incoherent so we locked him in the engineers room out of harms way while we fixed a few machines. When we returned to the room some time later he was sitting at the desk grinning and chanting ‘ and whats more I’ve been sick in the drawer!’ When we checked the top drawer of the desk it was true so we left him to sober up and he was given the task next day of washing the contents of the drawer out and restoring it to its previous condition.

The second story was told to me by the IT manager of one of the big banks during our regular progress meetings. It was a story that had progressed through the bank branch unit up the chain of management to the highest level. It seems that one of the branches had sent a cash card to one of its old and trusted customers who not long after this came in to her branch to hand the card back. The branch manager got involved when the customer complained and said she would no longer be using the card because of the language the machine used. She was ushered in to the manager’s office and given tea and asked about her problem. It seems that when she tried to use the machine for the first time the card had been taken in and then been immediately rejected, she tried again and the same thing happened, on the third attempt the ‘machine’ told her to f**k off as it was broken and try again later! She gave the date and approximate time and we were then able to trace the CE who was inside the ATM with the ‘OUT OF USE’ sign up which did not block the card slot and so he had to get his hands out of the mechanism very quickly every time the card was introduced and it all whirred in to action. Needless to say this resulted in yet another engineering change to block the card slot when in out of service mode.

The third ATM tale was also feedback from the bank about one of the ways people stole money, they had spent time and ingenuity fabricating a metal clip which they would introduce in to the money slot and then retire to a safe distance. The next customer would put in their card and pin and the machine would dispense cash but it would not appear, it would be held in the clip. When they had walked away our likely lad would then go back and retrieve the clip and cash and then refit the clip. This would go on for an evening and the next day the branch would have many irate customers demanding their refunds etc. The police got involved and staked out the machine but the perpetrator did not return but moved on. He was caught by the fact that he only moved up the road to the next machine of the same type so after 3 nights the police knew which was his next likely machine and waited for him and caught him in the act. Again various mods were made to the ATMs to try to stop this but there were lots of inventive guys out there so it was a constant war of attrition.

The next criminal activity associated with ATMs was where the lads would steal some heavy gear and nick the whole machine from the wall by demolishing around it. This still goes on as on the news recently in Devon they had pulled the whole corner of the bank down and made off with the machine. The kit they used to do it was also stolen.

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.

The customers were supposed to be notified when the power was going out to try to stop people getting caught in lifts etc and also to allow the large systems to close down the programs and power off in a controlled way. Despite all this there were always some that took it down to the wire and then the power would drop, the machine would drop power unsequenced and they would not know where they were in their work flow. We got called just after the power came back, we could stand on the balcony at the flat and watch the lights come on and then as the phone rang guess which customer had now discovered their system would not come back up.

Best case was just a few circuit breakers that needed resetting, worse case was blown power supplies and logic cards. Sometimes the damage to the tapes and the recovery of their programs took hours to get back to where they could restart. It did teach a few more customers to take back ups and put a bit more discipline in to their programs in terms of check points and restarts. We still had customers who had jobs that had grown from maybe a couple of hours run time up to ten or twelve hours or more with no restarts or check points.

There was a common malaise that customers did not like to change their programs, if they worked they would just let them grow like topsy. In some cases the guy that had written them had left and in many cases they were not documented so to try to alter or change anything was a nightmare as you had to wade through all the code to try to discover what was going on. It was quite common practice to get one program and do some mods to it to try to make it perform some additional function without any understanding of the original logic used. This used to lead to some weird and wonderful outcomes. I never ceased to be amazed by the totally uncontrolled and casual way business ran their systems as there was still the belief  held by the non IT management in those days that it was all some occult art!

On this day one of the other managers came in to my office laughing and swearing at the same time. He sat down and told me that he had been working on some documents on his office when one of his staff just walked in and sat down by his desk and folded his arms and looked grumpy. My colleague asked him what he wanted, and the reply was that this guy was not happy and he had come to see his manager to sort this as managers were trained to make people happy. We knew of no management course that covered this that either of us had been on!

One incident that happened to me was of a much more personal nature. I had a young attractive keen girl working in the unit that had over a few years moved from being a YTS to a technical role and then a sales role. She was enthusiastic and would have a go at any challenge that you put her up to. She was also very well endowed in the chest region and used to come and talk to me in my office about how this was a problem for her. She described how some of the male staff and managers just talked to her chest and did not look her in the eye. On several occasions she came in to my office and talked about having a breast reduction operation. I was against this as she was still young and did not think this would be good long-term.

Being the sort of person that I am I read up on the problems and side effects of this sort of operation and also some of the alternatives. One of these was a garment called a minimiser bra which I suggested to her during one of our regular discussions. Some time after this I was in my Basingstoke office with my manager and our director talking about business and as usual my door was open. I have to add at this point that both of these guys were never comfortable in the presence of women and were never relaxed when women’s problems were being discussed. During our discussion the girl in question passed by, saw me and made the grand entrance to my office with a twirl and flourish  ‘how do you like my minimiser bra! I then had to point out the two managers sitting very red-faced behind my door! At this point as they say she made her excuses and left. I then had to explain to my management that part of my role was to give very personal advice to my staff.

The worst culprits were in Banking branch as the customers had bars within their buildings for staff use and all the senior managers had a bar in their offices stocked by the bank. I had regular weekly meetings with my three accounts, Midland started at 1000 and we would have a coffee followed by G and Ts and then go across to Wheelers fish bar for lunch where the order of the day was a bottle of Chablis each. Barclay’s started at 0930 and that usually commenced with strong drink with a break for coffee and then back on to the booze. The part of Nat West was an afternoon meeting which usually ran on quite late in a vain attempt to drink the managers fridge dry.

One particular incident that still makes my chuckle is when I had been in with the managers whilst my guys had worked on a particularly complex HW problem which they fixed just after 1800 and then came to let me know. The customer invited them to join us for a drink and started plying them with very strong rum mixes. About 2 hours later we were well oiled and thinking of going home, when we noticed that one of my CEs was missing from our now very merry band. I was still conscious enough to remember that this guy was diabetic and was a bit concerned that he might have had a hypo and become unconscious. We all split up and started searching, this was in a huge computer suite over 4 floors and we were not sure he was still in the building. We all agreed to meet up at the lift well every 20 minutes so when we went back my senior engineer was stood there laughing and he then made us all follow him in to the gents.

When we got in to the gents there was on trap door closed and this voice ranting from within. It was my missing CE and we asked him what his problem was, he shouted back that he had needed a crap and must have fallen asleep and when he came round some bastard had been sick in his underpants! We eventually got him out and sort of dressed and in to a cab to his house. He was still ranting as they drove off about getting the bastard back for puking in his pants!

This worked well for the most part but on one occasion a slip by one of the guys in my team caused alarm for him and amusement for the rest of the unit. This person was chatting up one of the other members in the unit and must have decided to set up a nickname for the subject of his attentions. He then composed a long note stating that his intentions were honest and long-term and that he was really not like his reputation of ‘ wham, bang, thank you maam!

This all came to my attention when he ran in to my office in a state of panic to ask me not to open a note I had just read! It turned out that his nickname for his amour was the same as a unit distribution list set up to send mail to all my staff. As he left my office he received a cheer from the people in the support centre as they had all by now read his note. I think his relationship died at this point.