Outages avoided (was: Stupid outages you caused)

[David Spiegel]

Hi Colleagues, This is not about me. Instead it is about my manager at a 
large multinational food company in the mid-'80s. He was the type of guy 
whose picture should've been beside "penny-wise and pound-foolish" in a 
dictionary. We were using 3420 technology for tape. He always bought the 
cheapest reels and told the operators that if a tape was "worn out", 
they should cut off 10 feet and place a new silver strip on it. We had 
many reels that were down from 2400 feet to 100 feet or fewer. (The 
tapes were ancient history and a substandard brand.) One fateful 
Wednesday night, I was lacing up my skates (the rest of the equipment 
was already on) to enjoy my weekly hockey game and my beeper went off. I 
found a pay phone and called Ops. They told me that the entire 
production ADABAS Database was lost. I quickly got dressed and headed 
for work. Needless to say, a bad tape was the catalyst for this 
disaster. (It was compounded by my colleague who didn't bother checking 
condition codes in Production Jobs.) It took me all night and I 
recovered 95% of all of the files (via FATS and FATAR). ADABAS was 
available before the users came in.

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