One fun thing I enjoyed about IBM Global Services were some of the in-house developed tools we had access to. One tool they had which became invaluable was the

One fun thing I enjoyed about IBM Global Services were some of the in-house developed tools we had access to. One tool they had which became invaluable was the screw starter for flat-head screws. This was nothing like other screw starters commercially available, this worked beautifully and was elegantly simple. It was a thin brass rod about 8" long with a pair of thin steel lips out each end which started out in-contact with each other. When you shoved the lips into the slot on the screw it shoved the lips back into the brass rod and caused them to spread open and grab onto the slot from the inside. It had enough strength to survive dropping the tool on the ground and not release the screw. The tool was strong enough that you could actually fully tighten smaller screws without switching to a screwdriver. There were two sizes of the screw starter and we all kept them stashed everywhere. Once you got used to using this tool then it became clear slotted screws were superior and sooo much easier to work with than Phillips/et. al. There were never problems with a screw dangling off of a magnetic tip when held sideways, or non-ferrous screws not sticking. Another in-house tool was the very simple "thumb saver" for screwing in PC peripheral connectors like VGA and DB9 cables. It was an 6" plastic tube with 1/2" slotted interior ends which fit over the thumb screws on the thumb screws. There was a different diameter hole on each end and it tapered to a smaller diameter as the hole went deeper. It made it cake to reach in and remove a single set of thumb screws when the back of a system was jammed up with lots of other cables in the way or if you had giant man hands. You could also easily over-torque the screws when re-attaching so guys had to be careful using them. The SSA screw driver was another one, this was a custom screw driver for IBM's SSA storage system. My recollection was that IBM had proposed SSA to be the SCSI III spec and was rejected, so they ran with it anyway for use with RS/6000 (pSeries/System P/whatever). It was a serial implementation of SCSI and had these narrow blue/black cables and could transfer up to 40MB/s. The cables were a PITA to deal with as they were small and required the use of the screw driver because there was very little space to work around each connector so no thumb-screws. There was nothing terribly unique about the screw driver, it was slotted but had a sleeve tube shrouding the tip to keep the screw driver from slipping off. They required a bit of torque to fully tighten, but not too much. Occasionally some guy got the brilliant idea to cut the handle off one and jam it in a power driver. However no screw drivers we easily had access to had a low enough torque setting for this and these geniuses would usually end up breaking lots of connector ports on SSA arrays.