IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

WHO, ME? Comedian W.C. Fields is credited with the aphorism "Never work with children or animals," which The Register mentions because half of it has some relevance to this week's edition of "Who, Me?" - the reader-contributed column chronicling the ups and downs of working in tech. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Stockley" who shared a horror story that took place in the 1990s. At the time, Stockley worked for a company that ran an IBM RS/6000, one of Big Blue's brood of Unix machines. "The business was run on BASIC, with code going back 25 years," Stockley wrote. When much of that software was written, memory was measured in kilobytes. "Programs had to be broken into chunks, which were called sequentially with the CHAIN command," he told Who, Me? The company's tech may have been a bit crusty, but it made up for that by being a lovely family-friendly workplace - so much so that it invited staff to bring their kids in for Halloween trick-or-treating. Stockley told us that one Halloween, the company's IT boss knew the children would disrupt work, so started the day's data processing early, setting the chained programs in motion. Then his wife and children arrived ahead of the Halloween festivities. The boss therefore parked his children in his office, in front of terminals connected to the RS/6000. The terminals were switched on and logged in as root. In Stockley's telling, the boss's nine-year-old daughter had recently seen a movie in which a young girl somehow acquired Unix skills and saved the day by typing "SHUTDOWN." And when the boss returned to his office, his daughter greeted him by saying: "Look, Daddy! SHUTDOWN worked just like it did in the movie!" Stockley recalls that the boss needed 36 hours to repair the damage his daughter had caused. Have kids messed with your tech? If so, don't mess about! Click here to send your story to Who, Me? so we can prove the point about working with kids on a future Monday. (R)