With beer! In my youth I worked for a major UK Travel Agent with a global reach. As a junior operator I was tasked with feeding our card readers with decks of

With beer! In my youth I worked for a major UK Travel Agent with a global reach. As a junior operator I was tasked with feeding our card readers with decks of cards - usually a program followed by many hundreds of data cards carefully produced by Data Prep. So, one evening shift in Spring, we nipped over to our newly-opened "social" club, where we swiftly drank 3 pints or so of beer before dashing back to work. As soon as the mainframe room aircon hit me, I realised that the 10 boxes of punched cards of customers holiday bookings would be a challenge. I started the first box okay, then managed to drop the second and third boxes off the trolley. No problem, I just scooped up the cards off the floor and re-fed them - twice. Chaos ensued: the job abended, the shift manager went crazy and I was sentenced to spend the rest of shift decollating multipart carbon-interleaved paper. Never again!