My worst self-inflicted IT disaster

I’ve managed to stuff up many times over the more than 50 years I’ve worked in IT and computer related jobs. Many times it was localized and only I knew about it so I could fix it without too much stress. Other times — well it could be major when I did it right in front of a customer. The worst I ever did in front of — and to — a customer took place in about 1976 in while I was working for IBM in Lima, a little town in Ohio.

I was working on an IBM 403 Accounting machine like the one on the left side of the featured image above. The 403 was an electromechanical monster that required constant care and repair and it used IBM punched cards.

This particular unit was located in a small savings and loan and I’d just finished doing some work on it and had closed up the covers. As I backed my head out of the machine and stood up, my back struck something and I heard a series of crashes. As I turned around, I watched as several more long drawers of punched cards slid off the trolley and hit the floor in a crescendo that announced to everyone in the office the disaster I’d just created.

While the IBM cards I’d knocked off the trolley were still fluttering to the ground, the manager stepped out of his office and saw the mess. I looked at him and told him I’d fix it. He harrumphed, turned around, and walked back into his office.

If you’ve never seen a floor covered in thousands of punch cards, the image to the left will give you an idea of how many cards it takes to store a single megabyte of data. Many of those cards had slid a long way from the center of the storm and others had disappeared under other machines and furniture.

I called my manager and told him the situation. He assured me I was correct in telling the customer I’d fix it, and he called the customer to assure him that we — meaning me — would fix the problem.

I started by collecting all of the cards. Fortunately the lead machine operator was a nice person and assisted me by providing me with guidance for separating the cards into a master customer deck and a deck of customer transaction cards. He then showed me how to sort the decks, run them through the collator, and then place them ever so carefully back into the drawers so they’d be ready to run through the 403 where they’d print the monthly statements for each customer.

It took me several hours to recover from that disaster, but the customer respected the work I did to fix the problem. But I’ve always wondered how that trolly full of cards ended up so close behind me.