[ILUG] OT: Of Tesco Trolleys and Linux (was: anti-spam thing...)

[John P. Looney]

On Sun, Jan 06, 2002 at 10:55:22PM -0000, Matthew French mentioned:
> This example reminds me of one of my early lessons in IT humility: a long
> long time ago, I was doing tech support for a University and we had this one
> machine with two 5.25 floppy drives. For some reason people kept on putting
> their floppies between the drives, instead of into the top one.

 Someone that didn't like effort would have solved this with some duck
tape.

 When I was in DCU, we had a lab full of (illegal) Linux machines, with
one of them setup as a server (it did NFS & NIS). So, seeing as ten or
twenty people could be using linux at any one time, it was important to
make sure that people didn't sit down at the linux server, see a "login: "
prompt, and get confused, and try and reboot it. (Most machines ran DOS 6
back then).

 So, we put a little sign on the keyboard saying "Linux server, used for
projects. Do not use, do not reboot". That stopped about 20% of people.
The other 80% when for "ctrl-alt-reboot". So, we took away the keyboard.

 This worked for about 25% of people. The other 45% of people reached for
the power switch, before looking for the keyboard. So, we removed the
monitor also. All that was left was the pc (bolted to the bench) and the
sign. This worked on nearly everyone. But there were still people that
would come up, power off & on the machine, sit down, and then realise that
there wasn't a keyboard/monitor, just before they were set upon by ten
geeks that just lost some project work.

 Moral of the story; the forces of expectation are stronger than people's
forces of observation.

Kate

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John Looney             Chief Scientist
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