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A night shift in Edin-bleuurgh
The stories of drunkenness at work do not get any easier to read over lunch.
“A well-known brewery in a Scottish city housed its main computer centre at the bottom of the Royal Mile,” recalls Jim Blair from Hills Road Sixth Form College, from his days in support, “and an operator came onto night shift and took his place at the computer console.” The operator had spent the evening, to that point, in Edinburgh’s pubs and curry houses.
“In those days the console consisted of a golfball typewriter with an open well that contained the golfball, rollers and paper feed. The mainframes had an audible alarm, which was a fairly loud siren.”
The operator promptly fell asleep, only to be awakened soon afterwards by the siren – causing such panic that he promptly sicked up his evening’s work over the well of the console.
Pity the engineer who was called out for the “repair”.
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