Five years after quitting a job, developer’s former boss asked for rapid tech support

Connecting a single power cord turned into a lucrative all-nighter

ON CALL “I can't stand it, I know you planned it, I'm gonna set it straight, this Watergate” is the opening of the Beastie Boys classic Sabotage, a fact we mention as it will soon become pertinent to today’s edition of On Call, The Register’s weekly reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Wade” who in the mid-1980s made a crust by programming in Pick – the minicomputer OS entangled with a database that On Call wrote about last year.

Wade told us that he used Pick to write the software that powered a mail order business, before moving on to greener pastures.

Several years later, in early 1990, Wade’s mail order boss called him at home in the evening.

“He had fired the clerk who did all the work...

Copyright of this story solely belongs to theregister.com. To see the full text click HERE