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Comment by jsmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

I was even more amused that they linked to Gawker for the story about themselves.

Feel bad for the TD who brought his kid to work and was rewarded with 73 seconds of dead air, though. That would be enough for the average radio engineer to put that little troublemaker up for adoption. You think people take an outage on your site seriously? Dump about fifteen seconds of silence onto an operating radio station, much less a network, and people lose their minds. Executives run out of offices shouting. Phones light up. It's amazing. My record was 46 due to a router failure and I had the station's general manager riding my shoulder before I could restore air.

I've heard of firings for a minute, so joking aside, hope everything worked out. If they're joking about it on a listserv I'd assume so.

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I brought my daughter to work with me once when she was three years old. She managed to turn off our main UPS, back before everything was virtualized. Restarting 30+ physical servers while everyone else was losing their minds was a learning experience.

I can't say I blame my employer for instituting a strict "children are not welcome" policy after that, but I'm still rather annoyed.

These stories of kids breaking things at work reminded me of ultimate kids-at-work-gone-wrong story when a Russian airline pilot let his kids fly the plane. Such a tragic story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593

    2393 Kudrinsky: We'll come out in a sec. Everything's all right ...
         Gently [unintelligible], gently ... Pull up gently!
    2400 [Sound of impact, end of recording]

The end of those transcripts always get me. No kidding, tragic.

The term "molly-guard" for a cover over a Big Red Button or other dangerous control is said to come from a device improvised after a computer operator's daughter, named Molly, hit the e-stop on a mainframe twice in one day.

As a kid, I put a big Grass Valley video switcher into snazzy effects mode during a break in a show. When the show resumed, with several thousand visiting officials in attendance, the first slow video transition used was not the normal quiet fade between cameras as expected, but involved really cheesy moving, expanding star shape that belong on bad cable advertising. There was yelling in the remote truck. They still let me back in though.

When I was in television we wanted that star wipe for a parody thing we were making and nobody could figure out how to do it. I recall us spending about an hour digging around in the switcher manual and its menus until we gave up and did it in Avid.

Where were you when we needed you?

Fun Grass Valley trivia: look closely next time you watch the Death Star firing sequence in Star Wars.

I just looked up that scene on YouTube, and there's the switcher. Thanks for the chuckle.

At least on the Grass Vally switchers, I think you just had to press the star from the group of black and white wipe effect buttons in the upper right, the press "wipe" next to the program fader. You could use the little black joystick in the upper right corner to make the effect move.

At least so I remember from being eight.

I don't understand why you are being down voted so I clicked the upside triangle.

Thanks. I don't really pay any attention. It's not worth it. Mobile mistakes, people who don't like me, meh. Giving downvotes time of your day is mismanagement of your well-being because nothing good comes of it, and people like you usually correct it anyway.

> "We feel your pain, NPR. We had an office full of kids at Gawker today, too, and it is only by the grace of the blog gods that the place didn’t come tumbling to the ground. Mostly, we just talked sports and politics with them, and pretended to roll over dead when they pointed their Nerf guns at us.

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