A hit with the pointed end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could go wrong?

Who? Me? As the new work week begins, Registration he understands that many readers may feel like giving a set they tend to give a good slam dunk. That’s why every week we offer a fresh and hopefully cathartic episode of Who, Me? so you can take heart from other readers’ stories of tech support agony rather than getting overwhelmed with irritation and creating your own.

This week we meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Mel” who told us about his time as a field engineer for machines that ran Pick OS – a holdover that our sibling site Another platform recently recalled because it integrated the operating system and the database.

Mel’s employer wrote the software for the OS, although he described it as “as rare as rocking horse excrement”.

At least Mel’s client was running that rare commodity on good hardware: an NEC machine that Mel described to us as “bulletproof solid… seriously good gear, the likes of which I’ve never seen before or since.”

The “since” refers to the time since 1994 – when the box Mel was working on contained a 300MB 5.25″ ESDI full-height hard drive, an EISA caching DPT controller and a 33MHz 80486 processor.

“It was heavy duty hardware for the time, and serious small business hardware supporting 32-60 users,” explained Mel.

But it still needed an upgrade—in this case to a ‘486 DX/50 processor board.

“This board really rocked for the time, not only carrying a blazing fast 50MHz ‘486 CPU, but also a whopping 128K cache to really make it sing,” wrote Mel.

The technician arrived at his client around lunchtime and found the NEC machine on a shelf under the desk.

He then took a backup of the hardware configuration – EISA was that good – before starting the card replacement.

Suffice it to say, this ancient machine had a lot of components inside – all wrapped up and wired together. Mel managed to get the old processor card out, but the new one didn’t quite fit. The culprit seemed to be a multi-pin connector sitting at a weird angle.

He decided that a kinetic approach was the way to solve things.

“I grabbed the nearest screwdriver, glued the blade to the connector – and gave it a good whack.

Bad move.

“The connector collapsed and the pointy end of the Phillips screwdriver went through it and crushed the machine’s innards into a tangled, short-circuited mess,” admitted Mel.

Remember our mention of placing the machine under the table? That was good news – it meant no one saw Mel stab the machine. It also meant he could stay down there and try to fix it without being seen.

So Mel ran to his van to get a flashlight, soldering iron, and tweezers, and then spent the next two hours under the table trying to revive the machine.

When asked, he deflected that the situation was “just a technical issue with the card”. In fact, he was afraid of anyone seeing either the mess he had made or his rescue efforts.

Miraculously, he managed to stitch the machine back together, and when he pressed the power button, it came back to life. The backup worked, the new processor booted, and the job was done!

No one ever knew how close Mel came to stabbing the server to death with his screwdriver.

A few years later, when he retired, Mel was approached by a customer – thankfully not to be confronted with the inconvenient innards of the box. “I was asked to help migrate the same customer’s machine to a new environment.

Mel wrapped up his Who Me mail with the revelation “I never told anyone about the near disaster that hit their system. Until today.”

What’s the worst damage you’ve done with a screwdriver? Click here to submit a Who, Me? email to share your story. ®