“1 2 3...10 Enter” Not every technical problem needs a technical fix!

In year 1999 when the world was racing to patch computers to fix Y2K bug, I was busy doing the same for our customers and one such I remember was a Government owned Cement factory in Delhi. As soon as I reached the factory in the morning, System Administrator took me to the office floor of that old dusty building and quickly left to leave me alone to figure out rest. So here I was in the room with around 20 - 30 computers, all of which hadn't been switched ON, as the staff hadn't gotten over their morning rituals of tea, coffee, newspaper, pleasantries etc. etc.. Computers were new but staff was old, most approaching their retirement age!

I went to the first person in the row of seats and asked him to switch ON the Computer so that I can check and patch if needed. And he switched ON the power supply and started counting 1 to 10 and then pressed Enter. Nothing noticeable right! Then I went to next one, who religiously counted to 10 and pressed Enter. Ok! What a co-incidence! Then the next one, and the next one…. most counted to 10 before hitting Enter key. When asked, I was told this is how Computers are to be switched ON.

Obviously, I couldn’t wait to ask Sys Admin about the crazy ritual I had just observed. When asked, he grinned and told me this… he said the department was recently computerized and all the computers were diskless nodes connected to a central server (basically a dumb terminal with minimal memory to help boot the terminal to establish connection with the server) located on different floor. His server would hang repeatedly every morning and he ran between floors struggling to troubleshoot for days, until he figured out that new users would start hitting Enter key repeatedly after turning ON the power supply…and server couldn’t process multiple requests and hang. His solution was genius as you can guess :)