Techie Pulled An All-Nighter That One Mistake Turned Into An All-Weekender
The Register, Monday, March 3rd, 2025
Don't trust your tired self to do rm -rf right
Well, would you look at the calendar? It's Monday already, and by lunchtime any fond memories of the weekend will have been erased by work worries of the sort The Register celebrates each week in 'Who, Me?' - the reader-contributed column that tells your stories of making messes and somehow escaping.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Alejandro' who told us he once worked for a major multinational company and in the early 1990s was trained to perform a mainframe migration project. The plan was to bring a payroll app into the late 20th century by moving from a 1970s-vintage IBM box to a new NCR machine that ran Unix.
To make this happen, Alejandro trained for five weeks and made sure he was confident in Unix, as the old IBM box used one of Big Blue's ancient Oses.