DON'S MESS

    A few months after the toner incident there was a special task to restore the SAP/UNIX machine from tape.  The first tape cartridge was in the machine and was going to eject around midnight.  The machine would do some processing and call for a second tape around 2am.  I was there when the technical guy was explaining this to Crystal. The only odd part was that In this specific case they had turned off the checking so it would not validate that the second tape was the correct number. No big deal. Just plug in the second tape when the machine asked for it.      The next morning Crystal left at 6am and of course I was standing there at 8am when the technical guy and managers walked into the datacenter. Something was wrong with the machine. They ejected the tape to find that Crystal had ejected the first tape and when it called for the second one she plugged in the first tape again. This had totally messed up the box and made a huge mess. They could no longer access the machine.      

Back to stories about Crystal.  This is a longer story but worth the read.  It was a long time ago when I worked in the data center. On a normal night there were two Operators working. On this particular night it was Crystal, who was an experienced Operator, and Dave, the new guy who had started 2 weeks earlier.  The managers all liked Crystal since she was a good looking bubbly blond.  On the other hand, we did not like being paired with Crystal since she did less than her share of the work and wasn't always on top of things. It made the nights much more difficult. Keeping everything on schedule through the night was hectic and critical to get the different divisions open for business on time.        About midnight, one of the two large laser printers popped up a message on the console that it needed toner.       I will add a couple of important notes here….. If you have never had the pleasure of working with toner it is an extremely fine black powder. Much finer than dust.  For t