Pay Attention, Class: Today You'll Learn The Wrong Way To Turn Things Off
The Register, Monday, August 11th, 2025
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Steven'. 'One of my first jobs in the 1980s was as a training instructor at the headquarters of CAD CAM company Intergraph,' Steven wrote.
At the time, Intergraph sold its own customized versions of long-dead hardware vendor DEC's mighty VAX servers.
The training system Steven showed to students lived in a cabinet alongside a tape storage system.
'I was demonstrating to wannabee Sysadmins how to power the tape drive on and off,' which is pretty innocuous,' Steven admitted. 'Unfortunately, in a triumph of ergonomic design, the VAX power button and the tape power button were located right next to each other.'