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My heart stopped for a second at work today

E

Exterous

Super Moderator
Our super awesome phone mail system is from 1999 so it does not have a lot of the 'Are you sure' prompts that are built into more recent software.

I needed to delete a phone mail account. So I logged into our 33mhz 4MB ram modern marvel of a phone mail server and go through the text prompts and typed DeactivatePL which should then prompt me for the extension that I am going to be deactivating the profile on.

The "Deactivating Phone Mail..." message was not what I was expecting.
*Heart stopped*
Apparently I typed DeactivatePM
Did I mention that there are no prompts to confirm your command?
Did I mention that there is no way to cancel a command?

Crap. The icy fingers of dread, shame and failure squeeze my chest

Now - deactivating a profile will actually delete the profile completely. I have to hope that they can't have just a simple command that will delete the entire phone mail system. Right? That would be stupid - like having two different commands use so similar phrases and not having any confirmation prompts.

Fuck.

Now - they system is not all that spry so I have to wait as it oh so slowly adds another '.' after my ill fated command while it possible finishes deleting the entire phonemail system dooming me to days of hell managing an ancient system with no guide that was in place before I graduated high school

"Command complete"
"Call disconnected"

The window closes and my future with the company with it. Any second now the CEO will call, admonish me for being making such an egregious typing error. I'll be flipping burgers in no time having been black listed from anything involving keyboard entry. I imagine tiny pops and hisses as data centers all over the world immolate hard drive sectors to avoid being tainted by my accounts. My vision starts to tunnel

I open the window again and it skips the standard white text entry screen that I disparaged once but pine for now. As it trys in vain to start the Function screen my running stream of creative swearing devolves into a repetition of a single four letter work over and over again. I am not sure if thats because my heart hasn't beat once in the last 5 minutes or if my body is shutting down - unable to cope with the shame.

Off to the side I can see Maintenance has arrived to investigate the angry black clouds swirling over my desk. A nearby lightning strike sends them scurrying for cover.

But then - just as the black abyss and the waiting hands of Lucifer himself are stretching down to snatch me a light cuts a swath through the darkness.

"Phone Mail system activating..."

Lucifer crosses his arms and agrees to wait until its determined if the database and settings survived. His smirk is decidedly unfriendly and betrays what he believes will happen.

The stalemate holds as the system struggles to log in. Suddenly my cell phone vibrates. I look at the text message
"You got a prudy mouth - Lucifer"
I look up and he laughs a heartly evil laugh before miming all the despicable things he is going to do to my face in the next 30 minutes

The system comes back to that screen I find of so familiar and hope begins to blossom within my chest. I frantically grab my phone and call my work number. Each ring is an entirety and I stare intently at my office phone. Then I hear the sexiest voice I have ever heard in my life. My voice! My pre-recorded greeting telling me that I should leave a message.

I barely notice the enraged howl as my tormentor vanishes and takes his storm clouds with him. My heart beats once and then twice sending a back log of blood coursing through my body. There is a slight thump at the bottom of my desk but I am too weary to notice.

So weary yet so very very happy....

Cliffs:
Old systems don't have prompts
Exterous mistyped a command
Exterous fears he has deleted the entire company's phone mail system
Exterous rambles something about storms, purdy mouths and Lucifer
Exterous is wrong
Everything is ok.
Exterous will die 5 years earlier due to stress
 
Last edited:
yikes, that sucks, what phone system is it.. i hate working with those old nortle pbx/ option 11s, etc.. green screen prompt..
 
I never experienced that level of "what have I done?" but I witnessed it.

We had a homegrown database system years ago that used two-letter commands to initiate a function. The regular user retired and they had a new person learning the ropes. We gave her the user manual that described all the functions, inputs and report options.

I need to point out that the manual was written by the programmer, so it had no images, just a wall of ASCII text poorly formatted and printed on a dot-matrix printer.

So the new person sits down with the manual and attempts to use the system.

She gets past the login. She attempts to enter a new record and finds the command in the manual.

The manual says:
Code: 
To enter a new record, type in
 
AR
 
The AR command adds a new record to the database.

She types IN and hits enter.

That's when we found out that IN was an undocumented command to initialize the entire database. No prompts, no confirmation, no other inputs. In the 6 years that system was in use, nobody else ever did it. Due to a poorly-written document, and a new user mis-reading the instructions, it took her about 5 seconds to erase everything.
 
kranky said:
That's when we found out that IN was an undocumented command to initialize the entire database. No prompts, no confirmation, no other inputs. In the 6 years that system was in use, nobody else ever did it. Due to a poorly-written document, and a new user mis-reading the instructions, it took her about 5 seconds to erase everything.
Click to expand...

😱

dabuddha said:
Good read! :thumbsup:
Click to expand...

Thanks!
 
A friend of mine once took down an entire SAN that Exchange used and that contained all of the exec mailboxes... by bumping into the power off button with his arse. This was not a small company.
 
LOL doh.

nice ex.

last year I reprogrammed a router when migrating to new subnets, after about 2 hours of working on routes and getting RIP going it was passing some bad routes

its happened before, and to force the new RIP to redistribute I powercycled the router

guess who forgot to 'copy running-config startup-config'


this guy right here 🙁
 
Could be worse, I had to do that crap on an old NEC NEAX system in the mid 90's and the interface was a phone, command line would have been a blessing.
 
I've got a ROLM on my desk right now btw.

We got an email some few weeks back saying we're migrating to VOIP later this year.
 
Nice read!
I work on Comdial and Keyvoice voicemail systems, so I speak ancient. The Keyvoice runs on top of DOS 6.22. You use a diskbuilder program to make 12~15 floppies for a fresh install.
Sounds bad but you cannot nuke it so casually as that ROLM.
 
kranky said:
I never experienced that level of "what have I done?" but I witnessed it.

We had a homegrown database system years ago that used two-letter commands to initiate a function. The regular user retired and they had a new person learning the ropes. We gave her the user manual that described all the functions, inputs and report options.

I need to point out that the manual was written by the programmer, so it had no images, just a wall of ASCII text poorly formatted and printed on a dot-matrix printer.

So the new person sits down with the manual and attempts to use the system.

She gets past the login. She attempts to enter a new record and finds the command in the manual.

The manual says:
Code: 
To enter a new record, type in
 
AR
 
The AR command adds a new record to the database.
She types IN and hits enter.

That's when we found out that IN was an undocumented command to initialize the entire database. No prompts, no confirmation, no other inputs. In the 6 years that system was in use, nobody else ever did it. Due to a poorly-written document, and a new user mis-reading the instructions, it took her about 5 seconds to erase everything.
Click to expand...
So what happened to that person?
 
Krazy4Real said:
So what happened to that person?
Click to expand...

User: nothing.
Programmer: was requested to add a confirmation prompt to any commands that could delete data, and remove the IN command.

Just an unfortunate situation, you couldn't hang anyone for what happened. It's the kind of stuff that happens with home-grown apps that are developed on a shoestring.
 
skyking said:
You use a diskbuilder program to make 12~15 floppies for a fresh install.
Click to expand...

Good grief!

kranky said:
Just an unfortunate situation, you couldn't hang anyone for what happened. It's the kind of stuff that happens with home-grown apps that are developed on a shoestring.
Click to expand...

Good to see a company recognize that. All too often you see places that operate under "Someone is always at fault for something bad that happens and must be punished"
 
kranky said:
User: nothing.
Programmer: was requested to add a confirmation prompt to any commands that could delete data, and remove the IN command.

Just an unfortunate situation, you couldn't hang anyone for what happened. It's the kind of stuff that happens with home-grown apps that are developed on a shoestring.
Click to expand...
And while I dislike excessive typing and lousy interfaces that only make sense to a single person on the planet, there is definitely value in having descriptive variable names and commands.

Prompts, too: If a command can easily wipe out a great deal of work that someone's done, or a lot of critical information, it should probably have a prompt. I do some programming on embedded systems with microcontrollers. An "are you sure?" prompt really isn't a big deal to add.
 
Jeff7 said:
I do some programming on embedded systems with microcontrollers. An "are you sure?" prompt really isn't a big deal to add.
Click to expand...

True. The programmer's defense was that he had that command in the program while he was developing it so he could quickly reinit the database, then forgot to disable it when he no longer needed it and released the code. Seemed logical.
 
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