On Call Many folks start their day with the gentle stimulus of tea or coffee. But each Friday morning The Register offers a different way to kickstart your brain: a fresh serve of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of trying to bring tech back to life and we try to tell them in an amusing fashion.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Kevin" who told us of his time working as a hardware engineer for Norwegian minicomputer vendor Norsk Data. His employer had acquired a word processing outfit called Wordplex (and, according to contemporary accounts, ran it into the ground and milked its customers - just like tech acquisitions work to this day).

Kevin was asked to fix a Wordplex installation that he described as "a cluster system with a host based on eight-bit Z80 technologies, 10 to 20MB Winchester HDD, 5¼-inch floppy, green screen, and two slaves attached over RS-232 with no internal storage."

No, it probably couldn't run Crysis. It's a wonder it could run anything.

And sometimes it didn't.

Kevin was summoned when the Wordplex suffered intermittent and inexplicable crashes that he had been unable to address on two previous visits. But he suspected not all was well with the electricity supply, so on his third visit brought along an electrician.

Upon arrival, the sparky opened his bag of tricks and prepared to work. The client kindly offered a cup of tea, which Kevin gratefully accepted.

He then heard two things: the kettle click into action, and the word processing machine crashing.

The electrician investigated, and soon reported that the client had recently upgraded its electrics.

Badly.

"The upgrade had introduced a fault that meant a heavy load - such as all the salesforce coming in for a meeting while the aircon ran and all lifts were in use - stressed the wiring," Kevin told On Call.

When the kettle went on, it was the final straw - at least for the circuits that supplied juice to the Wordplex.

Kevin and Norsk Data were off the hook. Better still, the kettle still worked so Kevin got his tea!

"It was one of the most satisfying cuppas a customer ever made me," he told On Call.

Has tea saved your tech? Or cursed it? Share your stories of the world's second best hot non-alcoholic beverage - we're not saying what comes first but feel free to debate it - by clicking here to send On Call an email so we can feature your story on a future Friday. Or if you don't have a story, feel free to brew me a mug of strong Earl Grey with half a teaspoon of sugar and full cream milk. Again, feel free to debate that. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/30/on_call/