Humorous technology story

[Steven E. Protter]

When I left the US, I had a Netgear VPN firewall router that I thought would not work in Israel.

I left it with a friend so he could learn networking and port forwarding.

After I arrived in Israel, my networking home environment was so bad, I decided it was worth shipping here and the cost of a power adapter for 220 Volts. This tech gear is heavily taxed here, and I'm not familiar with many local brands.

So my friend shipped it. He was done anyway.

I received a US customs slip at my home from the post office. There were no instructions in English or Hebrew on what to do with it.

I took it to a post office here who I believe indicated for me in Hebrew that he could not help me. Postal Employees generally speak little or no English here and my Hebrew is and was weak, though less so now.

I showed the slip to several people at home and work and nobody knew what to do with it.

Today I took a similar slip to another post office, because I sent it to myself from the US and knew I really wanted the shipment.

Turns out he scanned the slip's barcode and found my package in that very post office.

So after some time the router was returned to Chicago, from whence it came. I'm having a router issue with a friend in the US and we decided this router was just the fix for the problem.

Somehow the power supply for the router was missing. My friend took it to Radio Shack for a replacement. Radio Shack plugged it in and it fried immediately because they failed to set the polarity.

It fried with smoke.

This Router travelled 14,000 miles round trip so Radio Shack could fry it.

I find this funny and Ironic. Radio shack replaced the router btw with a cash input of $10, which was less than the power adpater would have cost.

Funny?

Post your story.

If I laugh, its 3 points.
If I laugh really hard, its 5 points.
If I fall off my chair, its 7 points.

SEP

[Pete Randall]

Way back in my IBM mainframe days, my CE told me this tale about the mysterious keypunch machine problem. It seems that one of the keypunch operators was complaining that her machine would randomly insert spaces while she was keypunching in data, thus ruining her work. The CE asked to observe for a bit and, after watching for a few minutes, asked the operator to take a short break. As soon as the rather generously endowed woman left the room, the CE adjusted her chair a couple of inches higher, thus preventing her endowments from bouncing on the space bar. Problem solved!!


Pete

[TwoProc]

Screen Flicker

We had a user whose monitor would flicker. The operator checked each time she called and could never see a problem. One day he's called back, and she points at the screen and says "there", and "right there", and again, "right there." The more she saw it, the more excited she got, but the operator couldn't see it. This occurred and repeated for a few more visits. On the last occurence, Tommy again noticed she was smacking her chewing gum rather loudly. He looks at her, grabs a tissue, and tell her to "spit your gum in here." She quizzikly looks at him, and he tells her just to do it. She does it, and he tells her to watch the monitor for a while. Magically, the problem was solved!!!

Try it yourself, smack your lower jaw upwards hard enough (don't break nothing), and the screen flickers!

[Jan van den Ende]

SEP,

way back when, in VAXen days, clusters had their storage behind HSC50 storage controllers.
Those had their own consoles (VT200 in those days).
The near surroundings of the equipment had all power outlets in use, but the HSC50 had internal sockets for auxilary use.
One problem: European plugs do not fit American sockets.
No problem for the DEC field engeneer though: he took the American power cord, cut off the other side, and fitted it with a European contra-plug.
All chips on all boards popped like corn!
And the smell of that!
He had swapped "live" with "earth", and the chips for some silly reason are not happy with 220V.
The price of 1 quick connection turned out to be DFL 105.000,- (well, list price anyway) for Digital and nearly 24 hours of non-redundant storage and no use of tapes for us.

Expensive lesson: NEVER assume you know the color codings of (any) wires, especially foreign. Check, check, & double-check.

Proost.

Have one on me

jpe

[Kent Ostby]

My funniest support call, early into my career at HP was a customer who was on the phone from his computer room.

He said that there was six inches of water in his data center and he asked me if I thought he should power down his HP-UX 9000.

I told him he should log into the 9000 remotely and shut it down and then flip the circuit breaker.

*********************

Another guy I used to work with had one of those calls where the support guy (my friend Dennis) didn't really know what to do and the customer didn't care that much.

So the call sat, rotting in Dennis's queue, until one day he finally called the customer back.

The customer laughed and said that the building the computer was in had burned to the ground three weeks earlier along with the computer that was having trouble.

Case closed.

[Patrick Wallek]

Heard this story from a co-worker:

The company used to be on an IBM main frame and, like so many others, they used punch cards for all of their work. Well, they had a problem with the punch card reader at one point and had a technician out to fix it. After the technician fixed the problem the did a couple of tests to make sure that the unit was functioning properly. It was, so the tech left. Well, they then went to do a large data load (several hundred cards worth). As they were doing the load, they heard a strange noise. They looked and discovered that the tech had neglected to put the bin that catches the cards after they are read back onto the machine. So, the card reader was reading the cards and, since there was no bin to catch the card, the cards were getting thrown across teh computer room and hitting the opposite wall 10 or 15 feet away.

After that load they had quite a task to get the cards in the pile against the wall sorted back into the corect order.

[Jason Ray]

This one happened here a couple years ago:

We had an AIX machine that was approaching 900 days of uptime. As part of some new PR campaign, IBM was going to write a story about the server being up for 3 years (yeah, we know 900 is a bit short of that, close enough for them).

An FE from IBM was on-site working on another machine in the same cabinet. While pulling cables for the broken machine, the FE pulled one out for our other (up until this point) quite stable machine.

It was noticed pretty quickly that there was a problem and the FE was asked if he touched anything on the 900 day-er. He was quick to reply "I pulled this cable here accidentally. But I put it back in really quick!"

Well, sadly the FE's hands aren't faster than the speed of light and the damage was done, the machine had to be rebooted, only a few days from 900! So no story for IBM. And the FE was kind of "banned" from our building.

[Peter Nikitka]

Story of an immediate repair

When it happened, I could not laugh, however...

Very much thursdays ago, one part of the backup strategy of our
company included the saving of data to MODs.
These devices where connected to Apollo Domain workstations and needed a special firmware revision. Only one company in Germany had that part, and so a complete and working MOD under DomainOS was not so cheap.

One of our MODs failed shortly before the warrenty was over, so we shipped it to that company to get it repaired with no cost. We were told that we should get it back at the end of the next week.

Three days later we got an anouncement, that that company went into insolvency. We intervented to get back our MOD, but - time passes - only got the message, that all goods had been put in charge until all hearings of the bankrupt were closed.
Time passes - we managed to find a technical engineer of this company, who knew about our MOD and promised to try to repair it (not on warrenty ..) when he had access to this device.
More time passes - the proceedings of the bankrupt were closed.
Not so much time passes - we really got message of this guy that he would now work in a new company and could repair our device.
Meanwhile our second MOD began to fail ..

Some time passes - we got notice from the engineer, that our device had been shipped to USA to get repaired, since the parts were not available in europe.
Time passes - we got an invoice of the new company, that the device was repaired and got papers of proper shipping directly from the USA to us.
Nothing happend, no device reached our company.
We phoned with the new company and the transport office - the device had been shipped.
We let start an investigation, where our MOD may have gone lost.

Meanwhile we changed our backup strategy, because of the unreliability of our last MOD left. I did not want to ship any of this MODs anywhere - I wanted to keep it for restore purposes.

Some time passes - we got notice that the MOD had been delivered to a sub-company and that the driver had a paper with a signature, that the device had been delivered to us.
We rejected that fact and it appeared, that the signature was written by the driver himself.
Time passes - we got notice by shipping company, that the driver had stated, that he had not found anyone in our company, when he tried to deliver our device and so put it at the front door.
Time passes - we got a message from the police, that that guy had 'delivered' more goods in that way and we were asked to give evidence for a judgement.

The MOD never reappeared again - it had gone lost on the last meters on its way back to our company after having been travelled - Steven, you know - 10,000 miles across the atlantic and back.


mfG Peter

[TwoProc]

Some years back we moved to our new computer room, which had been prewired completely with nice new orange fiber cable for the network under the false floor. I brought in all of the small HP Unix servers, hooked them up, and happy that test servers were online soon.

The next week I brought along my production HP box, and wired her up and I was happily zipping along with new production (non-legacy) systems all running at new speeds, and no longer requiring tired old 100BT.

A few weekends later, it was time to move the old legacy DG server. We came in pushing in servers, and started the long task of cabling up networks, clusters, SAN storage servers, etc. After about 6 hours work, we were up, and ready to begin software interoperability testing with the HP servers.

I walked back the HP side of the computer room, and spied a nice hunk of TORN ORANGE FIBER WIRE lazily HANGING OUT of the pinch between two floor panels of the false floor!!! Near the HP Production system!!! AUUUGH!!! Just as my heart stopped, my mouth went dry and I actually dropped to one knee over this thing, and swallowed hard, and began to say in a very exasperated weak voice, "who in the heck did ..." .

I then spun around and I heard what sounded like a ROOM FULL of DG(EMC) techs, HP techs, operators, PC techs, sys admins, network admins, DBA's, and assorted software directors roaring laughing at the poor soul who was in charge of the move, and was just about to have a heart attack over the cut cable sticking out of the floor (it of course was just a hunk of scrap left over from a splice at the old building that they tore open and stuck in the floor).

After all those weeks of planning and worrying, the move just went too well and so they did that to me. It was a great joke, and they still get mileage out of that one (last week it was brought up again at lunch).

[Patrick Wallek]

John,

That was just plain cruel.......

Hopefully you got your revenge on them!

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Many years ago, I left my teaching position to found a three person software company that specialized in applications for local governments. Our approach was to blow the doors off the competition that were running IBM System 34's or DG Nova's and Eclipse's by running multiple Apple II's (thankfully running the UCSD p-system rather than Apple's DOS) connected to shared massive 20-40MiB hard drives.

One day as several county workers were busy entering data into the new (and first) computer-based voter registration system, the County Administrator walked in and asked if I could produce a report listing all the voters that haven't been entered yet. Without batting an eye, I asked him if he would like to restrict that list to the county, the state, the planet, or the galaxy.

[MarkSyder]

Story 1: The organization I worked for was just introducing computers. A woman had phoned my manager to discuss her requirements. She concluded with "I think I need a Wang". At least she meant to say Wang.

Story 2: This is very similar to an email that used to circulate concerning the Wordperfect help desk. I can't vouch for the Wordperfect story, but what follows is definitely true because I was the tech. support person. I was speaking to a lady who had reported a server crash on a remote site.

Me: What's on the screen?

Her: Nothing.

Me: Turn the monitor off then back on. Anything?

Her: No.

Me: Not even a power light?

Her: No.

Me: Try the server. Turn it off then back on.

Her: Still nothing.

Me: Take spare mains leads and attach them to the server and the monitor. Plug them into different mains sockets from the ones currently in use.

(Pause while she does this)

Her: Still nothing.

Me: Have you got good backup tapes? I'm going to have to arrange for an engineer to come out with a replacement server.

Her: I can't believe the day I'm having. All the lights in the office are out as well as the computer.

(Pause while I press the mute button so she can't hear me laughing).

Me: So you've got an electrical problem?

Her: Yes, I'm waiting for an electrician. He - oh!

The sound of a penny dropping!

Mark Syder (like the drink but spelt different)

[Ajitkumar Rane]

Long back in the days when I was working as a CE with a HP's joint venture in India.

I use to get a call from one of my customers which was a banks computer cell. The Manager there placed a call couple of times in the mornings his HPUX system isnt booting up. Well when I us to reach at the site the system would be stuck at the bchkrc# prompt I wuld run the fsck and the system use to bootup and running fine again. I use to explain him the sequence of shutting down the system and Disk station (holding external disks)But still the problem continued for a couple of such calls

After a couple of such calls I realised somthing would suerly be wrong. I would myself shutdown the system, power recycle, and the system use to be back up again fine. I told the manager the system is being probably going down abnormally and that is why this happens. Are there any power problems at your site, the answer no!. Who shuts the system, Manager: well I!. I asked can u show me how u do it.
I stood back and the guy started , shutdown -h
the system put up the normal message Do you want to continue?
The guy typed no.
the system was back at the # prompt.
Then he said now is when I put switch of the system and then the disk station.

Well my question why did u say no when the system was to proceed with the shutdown.
The reply Oh I thought the system is asking me if you want to continue with your work and so i answer no.

I had a broad smile on my face. and I explained to him the fact.

Hope this would not make someone laugh loudly but atleast bring a smile.


Rgds,
Ajit

[Bill Hassell]

Several years ago, I was in charge of an HP-UX email system (sendmail and elm) with about 1200 users. All went well (using mirrored disks) for several years (an HP 870/4) until one day, the LAN card quit. I was notified within minutes, found and fixed the problem in less than 2 hours and rebooted the computer.

I sent a note to everyone explaining the problem and promptly received a reply stating:

"In the future, please provide at least 3 day's notice prior to any unexpected outage."

A perfect Dilbert cartoon.

[Robert Bennett_3]

I was still wet behind the ears in the IT field and was on-call when I monitor an alert in ITO that one of our tape libraries is overheating. I'm scrambling when another alert arrives that the robotic arm is leaking hydraulic fluid. Now I'm pulling floor tiles and ready to call in the calvary when I finally overhear the distinct sound of my co-workers trying to hold in their laughter. It finally dawns on me that it is April 1st and I have just beened April Fooled.

I have gotten every one back over the years, but I was definitely had.

And - no - there is no hydraulic fluid in the robotic arms of tape libraries, or anywhere else in the data center, as far as I know.

[John Payne_2]

About 8 years ago, we had an old (at that time) DG-UX server running a fragile application that sat on the floor. The machine one day had caught fire. When the DG CE came in and opened the machine, there was a 1.5inch carpet of dust sitting in the bottom of the server. Things were cleaned up and replaced, the server was brought back up.

We're a university, and readily hire cheap student labor. At this time, we had a 'dumber than a brick' fashion design major working as an Operator. (I apologize to all the bricks out there and anyone out there who majored in fashion design) On a Saturday some time after the fire, our Facilities manager, who now had a nervious fasination with this server, asked this girl to vaccuum around the server. (Which also had a Clariion array of drives with it.)

I got called 2 hours later, the server was down, but the explaination was that it was nothing that bad, one if the other full timers was looking at it.

Turns out that this girl interpreted "vaccuum around the server" into "vaccuum the server". She had pulled every disk, at the same time, out of the array to vaccuum the machine. (On a running server!) The one good thing about the situtation was that she was very careful to stack the disks in an order that she could remember where they went to put them back, so we werfe able to recover. The machine, of course, paniced, and was eventually resusitated. We have never since hired a fashion design major.

[Chan 007]

Hi,

SEP, thanks a lot for this one, nice one.

I remember a few,

1. WALL Command:
Me and my team mate (Unix SA - Trainee) were doing a Change, so as per the procedure used "wall" to broadcast all users prior to shutdown. Normal procedures says once the system is back, we should call about 15 Departments to inform the system availability, just thought of wall and used When the system has come up. But no one got this message..!!!! So learnt "wall"

2. On attending to a PC XT problem, customer called to say that "floppy" is not ejecting out. Went to the site, and I tried it worked, but when I asked him, he said his problem. So I asked him to do one before me, all he did is just put a floppy in between two drives..!!!

Chan

[Senthil Kumar .A_1]

Hi all,

The 2 examples were cited by one of my friend. consiously discaring the company names...

Exhilarating experience's with the Customer....

1) A lady in a XYZ dept was in the practice of going to caffetaria often. She used to complain that whenever she returned back to the desk after taking coffee or tea the screen displayed strange patterns of images and got so excited, the IT dept was constantly persetered with calls of "Virus in my workstation" calls. While on the other hand if all she took was a glass of water and returned back to the system,the system seemed to work fine without any strange patterns of images displayed. My God whats with her, she happens to think some vodoo stuff working in the background if she sips a cofee/tea, oooh come on. Well classic example of IT personnel to put on the laymans shoes..

My friend had to increase the screen saver timeout value...

2) This happened quite recently due to the cursable advanced features of some graphics cards which was not required at all in the time-space demension we are in now currently. It so happened according to my friend, a customer ended with a feature rich graphics card. In meddling with the same he happened to change the display that was 180 degree horzontal reflective of the actual display. When he called in CE, He seems to have repramanded him for having meddled with the card setting and informed that what he did was irreversible setup as he wasn't aware of himself where to check it and fix the same. Well this no brainer finally seemed to have a bulb glowing in the far end of his upstairs and recommended a mirror setup for the monitor. The mirror was placed in 45 degree postion to the the monitor thereby getting the correct image on the mirror. Kudos, solved and I can't think any possible reasons for the customer to have liked this setup. As the frog in the small pond, this customer got used to working in this mode by looking into the mirror. Now the final day of the reckoning comes to the new company who took over the contract. The CE of the other company seems to replaced the graphics card and got the setting right on the actual monitor itself. Now the mirror showing the 180 degree reverse reflective of the monitor screen. Now guess what compliments would the new CE have got... Hahaha..

Not Thanks.. But a stern look by the customer asking the new CE to setup a 180 degree reverse reflective on the actual monitor so that he could again resume his work looking into the mirror....

Now this is what I call a "Vicious circle of life...."

Sorry for such a big tale.....

Senthil Kumar .A
P.S : By the way , Kudos to SEP, these are the kinds of threads that gives the edge to this forum over any other technical forum. Cooooool....

Gives a sense of bonding...

[Senthil Kumar .A_1]

Hi all,

No pointer for this,...

By the way , I was made to work on May 1st, thats officially May day over here. A public holiday. My collegues aren't around me. I'm covering up for them. :(

Now all I wanted something to lighten up the situation apart from my usual FAG(smoking) session.

And guess what do I get here in ITRC forum, This very thread, Better than the IT jokes I come across in "Readers Disgest", just the one I was looking for, a good thread with lot of hilarious experience of my fellow community. I enjoyed each and every piece that was posted here. Again great job SEP... ;).

Thanks for saving my Boring day...

Regards,
Senthil Kumar .A

[Geoff Wild]

Here's one.

Back in 91, a company I worked for (Airline) moved their datacentre.

The new building was amazing - latest technology (cat 5 wiring, etc), access cards to get to floors, open doors.

The data centre, was accessed via a "man trap". You had to swipe your card to get in...wait for door to close...then swipe the next door - basically - both doors could not be opened at the same time.

Huge IBM mainframe running, large network.
Workers connect from all over the world, aircraft maintenance, etc.

To exit any door, you pressed a palm sized green button.

One day, this senior IBM engineer (supported us for many years), walked up to the "man trap" exit, and instead of pressing the green button, lifted up a clear plastic cover which housed a red button, and pressed it - thinking that was how to get out.

That red button was the emergency power shut off for the entire data centre. It shut down power to not only the mainframe, but all other servers as well as all our network equipment.

We had issues with some equipment coming back online after power restored - including some restore on the mainframe...about a 5 hour outage alltogether...

Needless to say, after that, you needed a key to lift that cover. :)

Rgds...Geoff

[Jeff_Traigle]

I have a lot of stories. Working in an auto assembly plant for 9 years provides ample opportunity to collect them. However, the mention of the floppy in one of the previous stories reminded me of an experience when I was working as a computer lab assistant while I was looking for my first "real" job.

This was back in 1991-1992. People used floppies to haul their files around with them. The good old days when a 3.5" high-density floppy diskette holding 1.44MB was huge. :)

One day, this young woman comes up to me saying her diskette was stuck in the computer. This was fairly common as the desktop PCs were set on their sides under the tables so it wasn't uncommon for people to put the floppies in upside down by mistake and it could be a bit tricky to get them out for the majority of the neophite users of the time. It was all I could do to keep from laughing when I looked at the computer. Not only had she put the diskette in upside down... she'd put it in backwards... the shiny aluminum sliding cover was facing out. It took a bit of poking and prodding, but I got it out for her with no damage to diskette or floppy drive. I made sure she understood the proper orientation for inserting the diskettes in the computers before I left.

[Rita C Workman]

Hello Stephen !

These won't make you fall off your chair, but I've always got a kick out of them..since I lived them..

Way back when I was a young (yes I was actually young once) key puncher there was a major loss of data for the water billings for the City of "noway I say" Customer Water billing. Managers and auditors yelling .. someone's head is going to roll if they don't get answers. Yeah, like any civil servants were worried about that one. Anyway, my mother & I both worked as key punchers for the city and keypunched thousands of thousands of entries for the water billing (one card at a time). When we left for lunch, after the rain stopped, we were walking along and my ever so observant mother looks down to the curb and sees....cards. She bent down and picked up one and lo and behold going around the block were about a full tray of punch cards. You got it, they dropped them and let them lie...hundreds of them. My mother picked up a good bit, went to lunch (we both had a couple drinks) and then went back and she gave her boss a liguored attitude earfull of: "dah...you can find the rest at the corner of 6th and Lakeside" And no...civil service, nobody got fired.
======================================

Later when I became a computer operator, school during day and working night shift, the other guy would always smoke. Anyone remember those old huge IBM disks that you had to screw the lid on to remove them from a drive. Well, he dropped his cigarette on one and didn't even notice it fell from his mouth. Closed the lid and pulled the drive. That drive got a really nice burn, ashes and smoke mess on it. Our supervisor was his 'good buddy' and told the MIS Director that he had been working so hard running jobs he actually overworked the drive and it fried. That was bad enough, but the MIS Director had zippo MIS background, and actually showed up a day or so later and wanted to see the drive. He had heard how you can fry things when you work them too hard........I couldn't believe it...just goes to show that a college degree does not mean your smart....the 'schmuck' actually believed the supervisor's line.

I had similar ones to the others, like the time the lady called me to some fix her PC. It was my day off, she's in tears cause she has to get some report done....you know the type. She confirmed it's all plugged up, and it's running, she's in literally mass hysterics...so I get my husband to agree to detour so I can fix her [ Don't recall what event we were going to, just that he wasn't pleased..]
Her problem....she couldn't log in because somebody else had used her machine and their login was there. She didn't think she should go up and put in her login id, since she had never had to do that before.
arghgh!

Shalom,
Rita

[Steven E. Protter]

Hey Rita,

I miss you.

Thanks for posting.

[Jeff Schussele]

Well...this is not a tech story per se, but it's a *true* knee-slapper none-the-less:

Germany will be host to an historic soccer game (or "football" as the British term it):

With just over a month to go before the World Cup, a team of imams will play a team of Christian priests. "It's been difficult to find a rabbi who will referee on the Sabbath," sighs the Rev Christopher Jage-Bowler, "but we are trusting in God."

Swear to God it's true:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/5/1/142855/7098

Just goes to show that the funniest stuff sometimes comes out of the most devout - usually when they're trying to be earnest ;~))

Cheers,
Jeff

[Mel Burslan]

This is from the days of 8088 running at 8 Mhz was considered to be a blazing fast machine and we had out first HP Vectra PC with a 286 processor and decided to turn our old 8088 machine to test new hardware.

As an electronics test engineer at the time, I always wanted to try an HP-IB (IEEE-488 interface) instrument controller on a PC and move our HP-9000 test app.s running on rocky mountain basic to a PC platform. To make the long story short, I got a couple of loaner card from my local HP reseller at that time. One thing lead to another and after two months of very little testing, I had to return the cards to the reseller. The ISA slot covers were lost during the two months period as anyone can expect and we had to give this old machine to the materials procurement guys as they needed it more than we did.

About 2 more months past after this time. One Monday morning I came to the office and got a call before I can do anything else. The lady from the procurement department was calling.

"could you please come over and see this computer you guys gave us. There are some strange squeeks it is making"

first thing I thought was the power supply fan was going out, and decided to go check it. By the way, I was not the IT guy as there was no formal IT deprtment coverage when it came to PCs. The IT deprtment only babysit the two huge VAX machines clustered together and the terminals attached to them. PCs are treated as 'you purchased it you fix it'. I went there little out of courtesy more for the recognition as the computer wizard :)

First thing I noticed, the computer was not even turned on before even she greeted me. I asked her if she turned on the computer and turned it off due to the squeeks. She said no. I now was curious. As I approached the computer desk, I started to hear the very dim clickety-clak sounds, like someone at a distance hitting the keyboard keys eratically. As she stood by me at the computer desk, I pulled the old IBM PC case forward to unscrew the top and at that moment, she screamed like I have never heard anyone scream that loud. I little field mouse dashed out of the ISA slot and disappeared behind one of their filing cabinets.

Our electronics production facilyt was actually placed on old farmland and surrounded by vast amount of crop fields. Seeing an ocassional mouse here and there was not so unexpected but seeing one on the 3rd floor was kind of unusual as they tend to stuck around the basement level. After laughing out for five minutes watching all the women in that office climbing upon their desks, I unscrewed the case cover and took it off. Obviously mouse or most probably mice, has taken the space under the two floppy drives as their new pad and carried some nesting stuff, like shredded paper pieces to the location. After a vacuum session and scrounging around two ISA slot covers from R&D labs, their PC was operational again.

That afternoon, they found the motherlode of the mice nest in one of their old filing cabinets I heard. Needless to say they had lost few vendor files in the process :)