Who, Me? Tech team stood and laughed at colleague who pressed the wrong off button

Ticklish situation solved with a lie about emergency maintenance

WHO, ME? Admitting to mistakes is a ticklish task, but one The Register tackles head-on each Monday in "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that chronicles your worst working moments.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Bowman," who sent us a story from the early 2000s, a time when he says most servers were floor-mounted monsters.

"I worked in an organization in Glasgow with a datacenter full of them, some with an external disk storage array sitting neatly beside the server."

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Maintenance was complicated by the arrays and servers looking remarkably similar.

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One fine day, Bowman learned that one of the servers needed some maintenance, including a hard reboot.

A colleague named "Vince" set off to do the job, which everyone assumed would take a handful of minutes. Rather longer than expected passed before anyone realized Vince had not returned.

Another member of the tech team was sent to check that Vince was all right. He soon returned with a grin and suggested that everyone should come and see what had happened.

"Vince pressed what he thought was the relevant server's power button but immediately realized it belonged to the storage array sitting next to it," Bowman told The Register.

Letting go of the power button would have turned off the array and caused an outage, but nobody else was within earshot. Vince therefore decided his best option was to keep his finger on the button.

The entire tech team filed into the datacenter to witness Vince's predicament.

"After taking sufficient time to show our support and compassion by pointing and laughing at him, and going to do under arm tickles, we finally asked the boss to take the server down with the excuse of 'urgent maintenance,'" Bowman wrote. "And that's how Vince's finger got some well-earned relief from the pressure it was under!"

Have you been just a little cruel when confronted with a colleague’s misfortune? If so, you can confess by clicking here to send you story to Who, Me? ®