My Joke Backfired, Big Time.
Sometimes my jokes backfire. One classic example was the night I literally stopped the presses at a major daily newspaper.
It was the 1980’s and I was working for the newspaper as a repair tech. The newspaper used a Burroughs B3900 mainframe computer. All the news stories, circulation and the classified advertising was stored on this system. I was surrounded by punch cards, huge tape drives and disk drives the size of washing machines.
There was a team of programmers who coded in the COBOL programming language to keep everything running just right. I learned COBOL and programmed some myself. One of the problems I had was spelling the word PERFORM. Which you use a lot in COBOL. It always came out PERFROM. And the compiler on the system really didn’t like that. Since I was constantly having to recompile programs over and over again due to this one spelling error, one of the high level programmers put a patch in the compiler to accept my spelling and things ran much easier. In those days we didn’t have spell checkers in case you were wondering.
Back to the failed joke, If you needed to reboot the mainframe you did what is called a Halt-Load. Kind of like the name suggests it stops all the running programs and then loads the operating system fresh. It is a major process and was never done lightly. There was always a lot of discussion on any other way to fix something without having to Halt-Load. The command you type on the mainframe terminal to do this is literally HLOK, short for Halt-Load OK.
One day I came into work and we had hired a new night shift operator. A really nice guy named Hector. I was asked to show him around and help him with any questions he had. We were getting along fine and his first night was going well. I was fairly convinced that Hector had run a mainframe before and that things would be fine. My first mistake. Then he asked me about how we clocked in and out, which opened the door to my sense of humor. My second mistake.
Hector’s last name was Lopez, and I thought it would be funny to tell him that we log in on using the mainframe terminal, that way the time is on the log and the boss can see when we came in and left. All he had to do was type his initials and the letters OK to log in. I honestly thought he would know about HLOK and get the joke.
He didn’t.
He walked over to the main terminal and typed in HLOK and hit enter. The room suddenly went totally quiet. Take drives stopped, Printers stopped. Card Readers stopped. And down in the basement two giant presses….stopped. Which resulted in massive rolls of paper shooting across the room and making one heck of a mess.
If you have heard that line in the movies “Stop the Presses!” Uh, yeah. That is not an easy thing and rarely ever happens. I think it was an hour or so later before Hector realized his actions were what caused all these angry people to be yelling at each other in the computer center. I apologized to him and explained that I thought he knew what the command meant or I would have never suggested such a thing.
I asked a few times over the next year what that little joke ended up costing the paper. My boss would never tell me and he always said not to poke that sleeping giant.
Did I learn from that mistake? Yes and No. I don’t think I ever made another one that caused that much of a mess. But I can honestly say I did not learn my lesson. I still love a good joke.