Slightly deviating from the topic in question....
It's not always Oldies who are daft with computers - some of the so called members of the proffesion I have had the peril to work with in the last 20 years have made some of these pensioners look positively genius.

Probably the greatest idiot I ever worked with was Derek. I worked for the European Space Agency in Germany back in the early 90's as a mainframe operator looking after the METEOSAT weather sattelite system, and Derek was one of my colleagues. Derek was a tad unlucky - he had the worst stutter, a gammy leg so he kind of lurched all around the place, and was completely devoid of any common sense or confidence, and in the event of a situation would literally run around flapping like a chicken whose head had been just removed. In short, he was the worst sort of person to be around when you have a multi million pound sattelite drifting aimlessly out of orbit because a FEP computer is down.

In the corner of the computer room we had a robot tape system - for those in IT this was not an enclosed unit, but instead a load of IBM 3490E tape drives, a load of rotating towers which stored all the cartridges, and in the middle, a bloody great big robot arm which would swing around retrieving the cartridges then loading them in the drives. For safety the unit was enclosed and entry was only permitted with the machine in dormant mode.

One day, I'm ask to go into the area as some burk has lost a cartridge (having 2 sequences with the suffix 01 and O1 probably didn't help matters) - the robot worked on barcodes on the tapes but for ad-hoc tapes it could be told what tape was being imported and it would memorise its location - this of course was an ad-hoc cartridge so muggins gets the shitty task of going in to look through about 20,000 cartridges for this errant beast.

As I am leaving the 'fish bowl' to undertake this tiresome task, Derek pipes up he wants to shut down the robot from the mainframe. Now this is a very stupid idea for 3 reasons:

1. The command under JES2 was very long and impossible to remember, whilst it was simply an option from the main menu on the controlling PC next to the Robot.

2. By using the PC to shutdown the robot, you could properly tell when it was shutdown and thus safe to enter the area.

3. Why the bloody hell would I entrust my safety to this bumbling idiot?

Naturally he started flapping, but I put my foot down and told him I would do it. So after a few choice words in his direction I went to the system, shut it down and spent a fruitless hour in the pen trying to find this errant media.

Fast forward to the next shift and I walk into the tea room before work to find my other two colleagues in fits of laughter, and it took several minutes to get any sense out of their cause of mirth. Lynton, my shift leader proceeded to question me on if I had read anything by Isaac Asimov, specifically the I robot books - for those that are unaware robots abide by three basic rules:

A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It seems that after I had left for the day, Derek was not satisfied with my efforts so had gone to the mainframe console and entered the long-winded shutdown command into the robot. He then lurched into the computer room, opens the door and enters the pen - the robot then responds to a tape mount request as obviously he has entered the command incorrectly, but we think more adhering to rule 3, see his domain invaded by another machine and promptly 1 and a half tons of Robot arm swings into action and belts him clean on the arm, knocking him flying. At the time, Lynton and Bob had noticed his absence and cracked a joke about the rule, only for Derek to come lurching in, blood all down his arm saying "I th-th-th-think I ha-ha-ha-have had an ac-ac-accident!". The prat.

Anyway what became of Derek - well what only happens when you are that incompetant in IT - they promoted him. Me I didn't stick around much longer, and returned to England. I still think back to those halcyon days, and raise a glass to that robot - I just wish it had been just a bit more accurate.
(Waynster James Joyce is fucking my sister!, Mon 25 Sep 2006, 14:50, Reply)