The Developer Who Came In From The Cold And Melted A Mainframe
The Register, Tuesday, April 7th, 2026
The world is rapidly becoming a more uncertain place, but The Register tries to offer readers one small point of certainty by always delivering a fresh Monday morning instalment of "Who, Me?" - the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your errors and elucidate your escapes.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rob," who told us about the gig he scored as a Sybase developer in the City of London, sometime in the 1990s.
"Three of us were hired into a 'Being John Malkovich' style situation where we were added to a team that was too busy to explain to us what to do and they also didn't have space for us on their floor of the office," Rob wrote.
Rob and his two new colleagues were given desks on a new floor that had been added to the top of the building and "sat for ages with no one ever taking the time to come upstairs to give us any work to do."
While they waited to work, they shivered - because the new floor wasn't connected to the building's heaters.