Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work

Who, Me? Opinion varies about the most efficient way to commence a working week. The Register’s contribution to that conversation is Who, Me? It’s the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of your mistakes, and subsequent escapes.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Leo” who shared a story from the early 1990s, when he provided network and software support for a speciality vehicle manufacturer that ran both a mainframe and an AS/400 midrange machine.

Just one member of the IT department was trained to use the AS/400, but the rest of the small tech team helped each other out because some jobs ran overnight and someone needed to be awake to log on from home by modem to get them going. Sometimes those jobs failed, but competition for time on the AS/400 was fierce so it was worth the attempt.

This ...