Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server • The Register

Love hurts, but being exposed is more painful

Monday brings the shock of a return to work, a transition The Register always tries to ease by bringing you a new instalment of Who, Me?, the reader-contributed column in which your fellow readers admit to errors and disclose how they dodged the consequences.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Steven," who once got the job of installing a mail server for a client. "The project went well, until I noticed a board in the server was quite warm," Steven told The Register. He therefore opened the chassis and slid his hand inside to feel the warm spot.

Steven's intentions were good, but his memory wasn't: He was wearing a wedding ring, soon received a small electric shock and heard the telltale sound of a solenoid triggering. And then the server died.

Cursing his foolishness, Steven fought mild panic and tried to bring the box back to life, without success. At which point his client's IT manager appeared, pointed out that the server was offline, and asked if everything was in order.

Steven quickly concocted a fib and explained he was midway through a procedure that required a reboot, a story that satisfied his client and left him to find a fix.

"As I began to calculate the cost of the outage and looked up phone numbers to call for help, I heard another click similar to the one I'd heard earlier," Steven wrote. He half-theorized-half-hoped that whatever he tripped the first time had reset, and that the server might now reboot.

That hunch proved correct, the server resumed operations, and the client declared himself pleased with the situation.

The next day, the client called to report a problem with the new server. "I pleaded ignorance and went into mental overload and a near nervous breakdown," Steven told The Register. That response elicited a moment of perhaps accusatory silence.

"The client explained that their managing director fancied himself an amateur IT expert, and expected root and admin passwords to all company systems," Steven wrote. The exec had exercised his "skills" and managed to take the email server offline.

Steven was then summoned to fix the mess, lock things down, and charge like a wounded bull so the MD learned the consequences of their action.

"With relief, I did what was asked," Steven wrote. "But I too learned my lesson," he admitted.

Have you foolishly shorted, tripped, or triggered hardware? If so, let us know by – carefully – clicking here to email us your story so we can feature it in a future edition of Who, Me? ®

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