On-Call Techie Decided Job Was Done And Hit The Bottle Just Before His Pager Went Off
The Register, Friday, May 15th, 2026
A database specialist on-call during the Macau Grand Prix celebrates too early before discovering a critical application failure.
In this installment of The Register's On Call column, a database specialist named Jemaine recounts a weekend in early 1990s Hong Kong where he was on-call during a VAX/VMS system OS upgrade coinciding with the Macau Grand Prix.
Confident the upgrade was progressing smoothly, he relaxed with friends and wine until his pager went off during dessert, revealing that the billing application wouldn't start. After hours of investigation involving multiple failed troubleshooting attempts by the client's team and phone debugging with a lead developer, Jemaine discovered the issue at 4 am: the OS upgrade had introduced new permission requirements, and the batch scheduler needed administrator privileges to function. The simple solution of running the application with administrator rights resolved the crisis, and Jemaine was able to leave as sunrise broke.