I worked for a bank long ago. Realtime authorization requests and responses went through an IBM Series/1 box--at the time a stack of computing power in a 6-foot

I worked for a bank long ago. Realtime authorization requests and responses went through an IBM Series/1 box--at the time a stack of computing power in a 6-foot cabinet. It locked up occasionally, choking off communications to/from our auths system. Back then computers lived in a secured super-cooled room and we programmers were forbidden to touch anything but the keyboard. SOP was to call in a tech to "fix" it, meanwhile Visa and MasterCard would "stand in" on our auths, at great expense and greatly increased fraud exposure. After a few late-night emergencies I realized that the tech couldn't even do diagnostics without rebooting the Series/1. And he never found a problem after rebooting. That was at least an hour of stand-in time down the drain, mainly spent waiting for the tech to get in there at 2:00 AM. So I developed the revolutionary technique of hitting the forbidden Blue Button myself instead of reporting an outage. Worked every time, and we almost never went into stand-in after that. Management thought a firmware upgrade had fixed the S/1, when it was just the ol' finger on the kill switch.