Five years after quitting a job, developer’s former boss asked for rapid tech support

ON CALL “I can't stand it, I know you planned it, I'm gonna set it straight, this Watergate” is the opening of the Beastie Boys classic Sabotage, a fact we mention as it will soon become pertinent to today’s edition of On Call, The Register’s weekly reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Wade” who in the mid-1980s made a crust by programming in Pick – the minicomputer OS entangled with a database that On Call wrote about last year. Wade told us that he used Pick to write the software that powered a mail order business, before moving on to greener pastures. Several years later, in early 1990, Wade’s mail order boss called him at home in the evening. “He had fired the clerk who did all the work in application I wrote,” Wade explained to On Call. “They entered orders, sent purchase orders out and arranged customer dispatches.” It sounds like the clerk and the mail order company parted ways on bad terms, as this was a “You have an hour to pack up your stuff and leave” affair. “That was unwise,” Wade wrote. “The clerk used that time to sabotage the system … or so she thought, by unplugging it while it was printing the day’s orders.” When the mail order magnate realized the machine was down, he panicked and called Wade – who despite being rather surprised by the summons showed up and realized the first thing to do was plug the Pick machine into a power socket. “I spent a couple of hours booting it up, checking all the data and restarting the print run.” Wade told On Call his old boss was more than happy. “The loss of a night’s sleep was recompensed by the fee I charged,” he wrote. Has someone you’ve forgotten asked you to rescue their tech? If so, click here to send your story to On Call. We promise not to sabotage it if we give it a run on a future Friday. Or as the Beasties put it: “But you, I'm out and I'm gone. I'll tell you now, I keep it on and on.” ®