Odd O'blography

Sys Error 10

To celebrate April Fools, here's a story about the best prank I ever pulled at work.

In 1988, we got desktop computers for each engineer in the Facilities department. These were 'advanced' IBM AT models with the 80286 processor, a 1.2 MB floppy disc drive, and a 20 MB hard drive. One of the features of their PC-DOS 3.0 operating system was the ability to modify the command line prompt. When I came across this option, I amused myself for a few minutes by changing my prompt from the boring default of:

C:\>

    to:

Hi Terry!

Then I had a wonderful, awful idea. There were four desks in each bay of our systems furniture, and it took only five seconds to type the command that changed my cube mate's prompt to:

sys error 10 please reboot

When Matt instinctively pressed the Enter key, the 'sys error 10' message just kept repeating (as the prompt). But when he rebooted, the operating system reverted to the normal command line. Problem solved!

It took a couple of minutes for his computer to boot up, and Matt was soon frustrated by having to wait for a reboot every other time he returned from the restroom. I made sure to keep the problem somewhat random. The IT guy was even more frustrated because there was no such thing as 'sys error 10' in the manuals. The IBM service people were no help either. They hinted that we might be crazy. The IT guy gave up and told Mike to just live with it.

The 'sys error 10' message was a topic of conversation, speculation, and profane rants for several weeks. Every self-styled computer expert had an opinion, but no one came up with a solution. I just shrugged and held my tongue. The error message became more sporadic as time passed, but it never went away completely.

So, whenever our bull sessions turned to crazy computer problems, Matt would tell the tale of the mysterious 'sys error 10'. The longer it went on, the more I enjoyed an inside joke that only I understood. The end finally came when I moved on to another position. I don't think Matt ever made the connection, and as far as I know, he's still telling the story. My little gift to him!