(Just ‘cuz I’m not at Oracle doesn’t mean you all get a little bit of my insanity in the beginning of the week.)
So this is a bit strange… I am at home in my new office… “working!” This is the Washington DC offices for Access360 for a while now… their kinda nice 🙂
As a last prank at Oracle, with the help of Skippy and Fitz, I really pulled a good one of on… Brian Spendolini. Yes, Brian, it is time for a bit (more) of pubic humiliation.
Brian needed a monitor. Skippy and Fitz decided that he should get one. So, Skippy and I gave Brian my old xterm and told him it was a monitor. (To fill all you non-propellor heads in, an xterm
is essentially the forerunner of a network computer: it is a big, dumb computer that doesn’t really have an operating system or anything like that and is used in conjunction with unix machines. It is NOT a monitor by any stretch of the imagination.) Brian was happy.
Then Brian tried to hook the xterm to his laptop. He needed a cable. First he called Skippy, who told him to talk to Fitz, who told him to talk to me. We sent Brian to Fitz’s old cube to rummage
through the various boxes of cables.
(please be aware there is not way to connect an xterm to a laptop… that’s what we thought.)
Brian can’t find the cable and I send him back to Fitz, who sends him on more of a wild goose chase. To make the story a bit shorter, somehow, Brian finds enough cables to link the two together. He hooks them up, flips the power, and bang! a cloud of smoke comes out of his laptop.
I get a message from him saying he needs a new mother board to fix his fried monitor port.
Needless to say, Brian’s nickname has change from Spendolittle to XMan for getting the xterm to “work” with his laptop.