Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

On Call Every week is special in its own way, and The Register celebrates that fact by using Friday mornings to deliver a fresh installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column that shares your memories of managing IT messes someone else made.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ewen" who told us that in the early 1990s he worked for a company that made fiber-optic devices that sound like serious pieces of kit.

"Readings were taken continuously across 600-plus outputs by a sensor on a two-axis grid, driven by stepper motors," Ewen explained. "The motor controller was a full-length ISA board, as was the data acquisition board. We subjected them to a rigorous quality control process, including a long period of time in a climate chamber."

All the stuff Ewen's company made, plus a network controller, ended up in a tower PC case. "I believe ...