Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of delivering excellent tech support amid your colleagues' ambivalence, anger, and unjust admonitions.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "George" who told us about his first job in IT.

"Fresh out of university, where I studied history, but mostly fiddled around with computers, I enrolled in an IT course as part of a learn/work contract to become an SCO Unix admin."

Three months later, George had a certification, a debt, a job, and not much to do at work.

"Out of boredom, I connected the SCO Unix machine to a Novell 3.1 machine I installed, using TCP/IP." At the time, such connections were unusual. George's bosses noticed his feat and decreed he was now a Novell engineer, not a SCO specialist.

And then ...