Redvers Davies wrote: > > Yes it is, and IBM hardware engineers carry it as standard. > > Funny story. >
Cool, let's do funny work stories (or not). One of my favorites happened during my student days when I worked as a system admin for a civil engineering company which had spent a mint on an HP 1000 system and some terminals and an enormous plotter. They did their big drawings for subdivisions and so forth on it. The plotter generated a wikkid amount of static electricity in order to hold the giant sheets of paper/mylar/etc down. There was a switch one flipped in order to turn off the static field and release the drawing. One fine day one of the engineers forgot that step before trying to remove the paper. In her almighty effort to wrest the drawing against the static she ended up falling backward towards the rack which housed the computer itself. A bolt of lightning jumped from the back of her elbow to the metal. SPRATZZZZZZ. She ended up with a burn mark the size of a a pound coin, and the computer promptly went into a coma. I confess to being very upset, about the computer that is, but it eventually came up again after several hours rest. The engineer was pretty miffed that nobody seemed to care very much about her sore elbow.
