On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:22:40 -0700, Sam Siegel wrote: >Agreed. There are good and bad on both sides of that line.
This reminded me of something that Phil Payne wrote several years ago. Hope you find it amusing. Tom Marchant Subject: Re: (OTR) Fixing the user From: Phil Payne <s390n...@isham-research.demon.co.uk> Reply-To: ibm-m...@bama.ua.edu Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1999 12:45:13 GMT Content-Type: text/plain In message <369c3cff.d48e0...@ase.com.au> ibm-m...@bama.ua.edu writes: > Howard's invitation to throw some light into the dark world of User > Discipline stirred me from my slumbers... > > Ok, see if any of you sysprogs(sp) recognise this little piece of telephone > dialog with your favourite development programmer (dp): > > sp: Hello > dp: What did you change in the operating system yesterday? And why didn't > you tell us! As vendor SEs will tell you, sysprogs are no better. Indeed, the privileges available to them and an inflated idea of their own ability often make them worse. I got a call one morning in early 1984. At the time, I was the regional VS1 specialist. Someone had to do it. Anyway, the customer sysprog complained that the machine had "started running slow" over the weekend. "What did you change" - "Nothing". We all know the exchanges. I redlined to the site, and wandered down to the computer room to meet this guy and his boss. And _his_ boss. "Why has your machine suddenly slowed down - it's almost unusable?" On the way in, I noticed five strings of 3350s wrapped in plastic and awaiting transport. Casting around the computer room, I saw 3375s. "When did you change the disks?" - "Yesterday evening." "So you regenned the operating system?" - "Yes, but we didn't change anything." "You _were_ on Release 4, and it doesn't support 3375s." - "We just put a Release 6.0 DLIB on, but we didn't change anything." After a couple of hours, I couldn't actually point to anything they _hadn't_ changed. The real reason for their problems was that they had changed releases of Adabas - in dumping and reloading the main invoice database, they'd screwed up randomisation such that every single record had gone into the overflow chain. Don't ever try and tell anyone who's worked for a vendor that sysprogs are invincible. -- Phil Payne ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
