So a million years ago when I had just joined the air force, I was stationed in Southeastern turkey, and we were given prototype LAN setup. We had nine workstations scattered across base running unix, I don't remember which type.

The problem is that our official tech support was in germany, and although these machines could communicate with each other on base just fine, usually, it was truly a local network.

This meant that the people in Germany could talk you through a problem on the phone, assuming the phones worked that day. The power and telephones went out fairly regularly on base. But if it was something where they needed to be there in person they were about 2 days away, assuming one day to identify the problem, figure out they couldn't fix it, get permission to travel, fly down to the nearest city, get a rental car, and drive to base.

My boss decided, sensibly enough, that it would be useful if we had some sort of ability to troubleshoot problems on our own, so they paid for me to take a 3 week crash course in Unix system admin that GSA taught outside of Kansas City.

So I was about as competent at Unix sysadmin work as you would expect from a guy with a liberal arts degree and 3 weeks of training.

But never fear, new users in this case turned out to be even more problematic than my novice self

One night about 2:00 a.m. I was awakened by pounding at my door, the telephones were out again so it turned out that the much officer drove to my dorm room to wake me up.

I'm pretty groggy at this point but I get dressed and go in. And he tells me that he had accidentally unplugged the workstation while it was in the process of booting up and now it wouldn't boot.

My first question, given that the power went out all the time and consequently we had uninterruptible power sources for each workstation, was to ask him if there was something wrong with his UPS

"No," said, it couldn't be a problem with the ups, because he had given it away two days previously. There were some people visiting the main base from a fob that we had just across the Iraqi border in the Kurdish area, and when they were visiting they told him that they didn't have anything for their own computers, so instead of directing them the communication squad run for logistics like a normal human would, he just gave them UPS from the watch desk.

"But don't worry, I got a hand receipt for it.". Prestige to tear out a page from his notebook with illegible writing on it, other than the serial number. So I resolved to just hand that one over to my boss and let him figure it out.

So then I turned to solving the actual problem. In my groggy mental state, I could still remember to run fsck on the drive. It takes me about 20 minutes to get everything reset, partially because it's a slow hard drive and partially because I'm new and can only vaguely remember what I'm supposed to be doing

I get everything finished, and I am rebooting the machine so he can log back in because these are really slow it takes about 10 minutes. And this guy is nervous because he's embarrassed that he had to wake me up, he's embarrassed because he finally realized that he gave away hardware without authorization to do so and that there are may or may not be consequences (there were not),

So he's jabbering nervously at me randomly while the thing is rebooting and at some point he decides he wants to tell me how he accidentally unplugged the device while it was in the process of booting.

And he decides to use a prop, in this case a vacuum cleaner. He explains that night shift has to vacuum the watch floor every night, and he was vacuuming underneath one of the desks when it happened. As he does this he slams The vacuum cleaner underneath the desk in which the Unix workstation is plugged in. The vacuum cleaner hits the plug and rips it out of the wall, just like he had done earlier that evening

Because there is no UPS, the exact same thing happens. The box shuts down mid boot, won't reboot, and now I have to run fsck on it again. At least this time it took me only about 15 minutes to go through the process because it was fresh in my mind

That young Captain retired as a brigadier general. I sincerely hope he got smarter as he got older