On Call: How not to maintain computers

Crossposted from https://beehaw.org/post/24258253

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Wilson” who once worked as the boss of a welding shop attached to an engineering consultancy.

Wilson set the scene by telling us this story came from the early 1980s, when AutoCAD was replacing drawing boards.

“We had a new structural engineer who those of us in the shop quickly identified as an idiot with a degree,” Wilson wrote.

One day, said idiot decided that the computers used to run AutoCAD needed to be cleaned and that the welding shop was the place to do the job.

  • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    59·
    1 day ago

    The company let the idiotic engineer go a couple of months later for deleting AutoCAD from his computer to make room on its hard drive for a game.

    So destroying five PCs, and losing a lot of project files, is a-okay 👍. But deleting AutoCAD for a video game is where the line gets drawn? 🤦‍♂️ 😂

    • deegeese@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      61·
      1 day ago

      A new guy broke equipment because he tried to help with something he was not trained on. Maybe we can fix him.

      Guy who’s been here for months tossed out a critical tool in order to goof off more effectively. Sounds like he doesn’t want to work here at all.

    • lechekaflan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      Besides being expensive, AutoCAD in the 80s needed a lot of floppies to install it, and hard drives at the time were very large but have small space, like about 20mb.

      • GenosseFlosse@feddit.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        Which PC had a 2mb hard drive? Smallest 286 PCs I can remember already had 20MB, and a floppy disk would hold 720kb or 1.44MB.

    • Fedizen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      1 day ago

      The corporate mantra is “look like you’re doing work, even if that display is negatively impacting productivity” with the corrallary “Never look like you’re not doing work even when by not working you’re increasing productivity”