Stupidity is it's own reward

I've known some stupid people in my life, but a man named Steve took the cake. I was a consultant for a company named Software Techniques way back in 1982. Remember, this was practically the dark ages of computers - no internet and no PCs. Equipment was horribly expensive; a 40 megabyte drive cost over $10,000 (today a 120 gigabyte drive goes for under 200 bucks).

Steve had a little business doing, well, whatever he could figure out to make money. Every day he seemed to have a different angle, a new way to pull in a few bucks. Sometimes these businesses were completely legal, and sometimes they were definitely on the border - but as far as I know Steve never crossed the line.

Anyway, Steve needed a computer system and he didn't have the hundred thousand dollars handy. Actually, I doubt he even had the money for the electricity to run the computer. So he had a real problem - how to get a computer without actually paying any money for it.

On this occasion Steve pulled off the impossible. Here's how he did it. Back in those days, it was common for a company (called an OEM) to resale equipment. The manufacturer would deliver the equipment and allow the OEM to keep it, usually in a box in a warehouse, without charge. Steve convinced Plessy Computer Systems that he was an OEM and signed a contract stating they would deliver him a brand spanking new computer system, worth over a hundred thousand dollars, for an unspecified amount of time at no charge. Plessy believed the computer was going to be resold; perhaps Steve really did intend to do that some day - but he also intended to put the system to good use in the meantime. After all, the contract did not say anything at all about whether or not the computer could be used by the OEM.

Steve hired us to set up the computer in his office, in exchange for allowing us unlimited use of it to develop our own programs. As far as I knew, Steve bought the computer honestly - I didn't find out how he actually obtained it until later.

We set up the computer and merrily went about our business. Occasionally Steve asked us to do something for him, always in exchange for some service, and we complied. For us, a small consulting company working on a limited budget, it was an ideal exchange, and for Steve it was also ideal.

We were pretty good at our jobs, and we set up a very strong backup procedure. We knew from experience that it was common for computer systems to fail and to lose data. Thus, we set up the procedure to back up the data to tape and to disk. In those days, tapes and disks were horribly expensive (and Steve was short of funds) so we had a tow-tape rotation and a weekly disk-to-disk backup. This seemed pretty fool proof; we didn't count on the complete babbling idiot syndrome.

One evening we got a phone call that Steve needed our help. He was working late and his computer system starting making screeching noises. It was late and he didn't want to bother anyone, so he investigating himself and determined that the main disk drive was bad.

Okay, he thought, he'd just swap the drives around. He did that (he apparently watched us do it for him once or twice) and now the second drive was making a funny sound. Odd, he thought, and loaded his two backup disks. Before too long he had destroyed all of his backup disks.

Well, we could still restore from tape - or so we thought. Steve explained that he had loaded the backup tape into the drive and somehow managed to destroy it as well.

And that's how Steve managed to completely destroy his computer and all of the data in one evening completely without the aid of anyone.

It took some work, but we managed to rebuild his system, albeit with a bit of data loss. We merrily went about our business and Steve happily thought up newer and stranger ways to make money.

One day one of our employees (Tom) was working upstairs over the main office. Now Steve made sure that the doors were always locked. we were cautioned, although we never got an explanation, to always lock the doors. Anyway, Tom heard a yell from outside and stuck his head out the windows.

A man wanted to get into the building. Tom didn't know what was going on, but politely refused. The man tried to talk to Tom, to convince him to open the door, but Tom said no. Finally, the poor guy identified himself as a private investigator for Plessy computer systems. His job was to find and recover the computer system. Since it was not exactly stolen they could not just call the police, but if they could gain entrance to the building they could recover the computer.

Tom said that was very interesting, but he still was not opening the door. The man offered him a bribe, which Tom politely refused, then got angry and left.

The next morning I arrived at Steve's office to do some work and found the computer was missing. Just a few wires were left, poking out of the roof, along with some scruff marks on the floor. At first I thought it had been stolen, but soon found out what really happened.

Okay, one thing to remember about computers from those days is they were very large and fragile. Moving a computer was generally something you hired a special company for, and they charged thousands of dollars and planned for weeks. One mistake and you lose your data for good, and any damages that needed to be fixed would be lengthy and expensive.

Steve didn't have the money or the time, so he just rented a truck, got a couple of friends together and they loaded the thing up in the middle of the night. No worries, not a care in the world. And guess what? He successfully moved the equipment to another location - and he didn't tell anyone.

I lost contact with Steve after that. We decided he was just too, well, different for us. Having access to a powerful computer, office and staff was nice (and free), but the frustration every few days of having to deal with new and bizarre happenings was just more than we could bear.