Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Storage

The alternative was paying up and moving back in with his parents

WHO, ME? The world of work is basically broken, which is why The Register uses Monday mornings to remind readers of that foul fact in a new instalment of “Who, Me?” – the reader-contributed column that shares your mistakes and reveals how you recovered from them.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Hank” who told us his career started in the 1990s with a gig as sysadmin for a small town poultry factory that was an outpost for a larger company.

“I was brimming with excitement to work on the latest tech, Novell NetWare  4.1!” he told The Register.

One of the first things Hank was asked to do was a storage upgrade for a pair of servers.

“We bought a pair of very expensive 750MB disks and since I was the sole IT person at the plant, head office sent me the drives and put me in charge of the upgrade.”

Hank was excited when the drives arrived, so he unboxed them and spent a little time fondling what was then just about the most capacious and expensive storage device money could buy.

“Who would not want to touch 750MB SCSI drives with blazing fast reads courtesy of 10,000 RPM spindles?” he asked. “It was cutting edge!”

It was also rather slippery, because after removing one of the drives from its anti-static bag, Hank dropped it.

“Panic set it shortly after,” he admitted. “This drive was worth more than I made in a month. I was still new and on probation. Visions of unemployment and having to move back in with my parents danced through my head.”

Hank’s solution was to tell a big fat lie.

“I called my boss told them I thought one of the drives was making a strange sound and might have an issue.” Then Hank played his trump card, offering the wise-beyond-his-years suggestion that it would be a waste of time to do the upgrade with a bad drive.

His boss agreed and told Hank how to contact the vendor to have a new drive delivered overnight.

“The new drive arrived the next day and the upgrade went off without a hitch,” Hank said. “And I learned to sit down when handling expensive hardware.”

Have you broken hardware and blamed it on something else? If so, break your mouse by clicking here to send email to Who, Me? We’d love the chance to share your story! ®