A true war story ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I used to work for the dearly departed Ingres, a relational database company. One day, the folks in Tech Support wandered up the stairs to the floor I worked on. They looked particularly ashen-faced. Someone finally asked them what the problem was. Apparently, Edison Power and Light (the New Jersey equivalent of PG&E) had called our East Coast support office in Saddlebrook, NJ, a half-hour earlier. They used Ingres to keep track of the rods moving around in the nuclear cores on a DEC VAX. Somehow, the database had become corrupted. If it didn't get fixed in four hours, when the next core rotation began, a meltdown was likely. Fortunately, (1) our Saddlebrook office was a half-hour from their site, and (2) all VAXes had the ability to have remote hardware diagnosis performed by their world-wide support center in Colorado Springs, CO, through a piece of firmware built into every VAX. Not surprisingly, the folks at DEC gave this problem a rather high priority. After about an hour and a half, it was determined that a disk sector was corrupted. It was repaired, and life as we continue to know it went on. Welcome to Product Land, folks! It's got a different set of problems than Academia taught us all. Remind me to tell you about answering questions about how we at Ingres said we would provide support during nuclear wars at a sales call to the Strategic Air Command some time... -- NOTE: I did not write this. I am publishing it on the web purely for the enjoyment of the human race. Apologies to anyone who performed or assisted in the creation of this document; I would have credited you if I knew who you were. -- Alastair Irvine,