No good deed goes unpunished -- for anyone involved
It's quite a few years back, and this consultant pilot fish is assigned to visit a customer with a history of intermittent and hard-to-pin-down issues.
"After I talked with the boss, the decision was to try realigning the heads on their big disk drive," says fish. "Because the system was critical infrastructure during the day, the work needed to be done in the middle of the night -- and done it was.
"The friendly operator was not an early riser, so he had asked if I could reboot the production system after the alignment. I mounted the production pack and initiated the boot -- only to see the boot device jam, and hear the disk-drive diagnostic -- which was still in memory -- start writing over the production boot block.