Both sides of the fence
For most of you who don't know, thin-net was the standard before 10 Base-T. The standard was a coax cable based system that had a 50 ohm termination on each end of a single run of cable. Each PC was tied in with a tee connector.
Back in the thin-net days I was network Manager in a company that had one server, one network hub and four thin-net branches running from the hub. I got a urgent page (yah, we had pagers back then too) - I called and the network was down hard. I immediately looked at the hub and noticed a error light on one branch & started chasing. I found the issue right away - Randy, one of our Test Engineers unplugged the tee connector from the back of his PC, added a 4' extension then plugged the extension into his PC so that he could re-arrange his office. I explained why "you can't do that with thin-net", removed the cable and he put his PC back where it was. Everything ran fine until Randy did the exact same thing again 4 months later. And he brought the network down 3 more times between the second time and when we finally installed a 10 base-T network.
Then there was Doug, the Quality Engineer who called because his monitor screen was distorted with the top right corner mostly red and the top left corner mostly blue. I grabbed the magnetic toy he had placed on top of the monitor, which immediately took care of the problem. I handed the toy to him and said "don't do that". He placed that toy back on the monitor & called because his monitor was distorted three more times over the next three months until I picked up his toy and threw it in the trash. Then he reported me to management & when the dust settled his feelings were hurt and magnetic toys were banned from all Engineers offices.
