Who, Me? Tech team stood and laughed at colleague who pressed the wrong off button
Ticklish situation solved with a lie about emergency maintenance
In the early 2000s, a recipient of The Register's "Who, Me?" column, referred to as Bowman, recounted a humorous incident involving a colleague's mistaken button press. Bowman worked in a Glasgow datacenter with numerous servers and storage arrays. One day, a server required maintenance, necessitating a hard reboot. A colleague named Vince was tasked with the job, but his return time exceeded expectations.
Concerned, another team member went to check on Vince. Upon his return, Vince had inadvertently pressed the power button, not on his server, but on the adjacent storage array. Realizing his mistake, Vince chose to keep his finger pressed on the button, as releasing it would cause an outage. The entire tech team gathered to witness Vince's predicament, offering their support by laughing and even attempting under arm tickles.
Eventually, they convinced the boss to perform the necessary maintenance under the pretext of urgency. This incident allowed Vince's finger to find relief from the pressure it had been under.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Science's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
