Since we're swapping bad backup stories.
I'm at a small mainframe vendor, mid-90s. Data center manager quits with no notice because boy genius sociopath CFO tell him at the last minute that he can't take long-planned, prepaid vacation trip because CFO wants him there for something stupid. This was not just a fit of pique-it was the final straw in a large bale. His sidekick takes over, proves himself to be a junior sociopath. While he's out of town, Senior VP of Marketing wants DNS redirected to actual web page instead of static page we'd been hosting on VM/ESA in lieu of having a real site. This is before cellphones, so I have no way to reach junior sociopath. I was running our DNS (we were the ONLY site on the planet running a primary DNS on VM at the time, as proven by our discovering that IBM had implemented their DNS server in strict accordance with the RFCs, meaning name service broke when a secondary pulled from it), so I make the change, send sociopath email. He gets back and is pissed that he "wasn't consulted" (as if he was going to buck the Sr. VP). He pulls my system privileges, which I need to, like, do my job, which includes supporting ~40% of our revenue. That leads to a confrontation with our mutual manager: "Put them back." "No." "PUT. THEM. BACK." "No. I'll walk out that door first." "OK, bye." So now he's gone. We tell boy genius CFO "Somebody needs to take this over"; he's smarter than everyone else, doesn't see the need. Few weeks later, day or two before Christmas, I get a call from a cow-orker. "We lost an HDA, and boy genius hasn't had anyone doing backups, so the newest one is months old". He then runs through a list of minidisks we've lost, which are all noise except the last one in his list (just as I was calming down!), which included a fix I'd finished a few days before that had taken months to develop. Fortunately it was about 99% faster to rewrite, since I knew what the problem was. No, boy genius didn't get fired or even get his wrist slapped. CEO was equally clueless. I sometimes wonder how these people wind up in a business they don't begin to understand. And before someone says "You should have been running backups anyway", no: we had warned repeatedly and didn't have access to do so. We knew the main source code was backed up, so it was just service like my fix that was at risk. And of course this was long before mainframe use of git or anything like that, at least at our ~50-person company-fixes written on 3270s, so not even a backup on PC. I think after that, though, I started downloading difficult fixes so I wouldn't have to recreate them. That was also the company where I owned some small number of shares of stock, because my wife (whom I met there-she had retired by then) had been granted some in the early days. That meant I was the only employee besides the executives who would show up for stockholder meetings, which they HATED because it limited their ability to lie to the other investors, knowing that I was willing to say "Gosh, sir, you must have forgotten/been misinformed/be lying through your teeth." Good times. Share your stories. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
