Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

software

Never believe a suit who says they're handy with tech

WHO, ME? Mistakes happen, and when readers of The Register make them, we like to share those tales of woe in a Monday column we call "Who, Me?" It's our guide on how not to get ahead in the modern workplace.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as Clay, who in the 1980s was the most junior member of the management team on a Swedish construction site.

"We had two site engineers, and they were the only ones with computers," he explained to The Register.

This was a time before PCs had become ubiquitous, so Clay was curious about the machines.

"One lunch break, I asked the junior engineer if I could try his PC," he told us.

The junior had little choice but to comply, so Clay sat down at the machine and used the only command he knew.

"It worked," he told Who, Me?

"But unfortunately, that command was 'DEL *.*'"

Clay had therefore deleted everything in whatever directory the engineer had allowed him to access.

"Thankfully, my colleague was very relaxed and forgave me, so I got to keep my job," he told The Register.

"But 'DEL *.*' still haunts me!"

The moral to this story seems clear: do not under any circumstances let a suit take control of computers!

Have you let a user wreak havoc on your machine? If so, click here to send an email to this column, so we can show readers how not to cause chaos on some future Monday. ®