Found while cleaning my cubicle
Today was declared a "Cleaning Day" by the powers that be here at work, so I'm blogging a couple of items I found in my stack which I'm going to go ahead and toss. Besides the old toys (I kept only 4 out of a couple dozen) and scads of documentation and manuals that I've never read, I found:
1. An article from June 14, 2000 by the AJC's Cynthia Tucker that I kept because of its opening paragraph:
In the wee hours of the morning of Jan. 31, two men lay on a Buckhead sidewalk dying of the stab wounds they had received in a street brawl outside a bar. The men, Jacinth Baker, 21, and Richard Lollar, 24, were not powerful or wealthy or well-known. In fact, they were everyday working stiffs.2. A dot-matrix-printed sign I made for one of my old systems. It reads,
"NOTICE: DO NOT UNPLUG THESE PHONE LINES. THESE PHONE LINES WILL NOT PERMIT OUTGOING CALLS."
This sign solved a problem that one of my systems had in the late '80's, during the boom in pay "900 number" phone services. We were told that 900 number sex line charges had appeared on the phone bill for one of the modems on the system. Some unknown person had been unplugging phone lines from the back of the modem and into a telephone to do his disgusting business.
We asked our phone support guys to make the line incoming-only; couldn't be done, we were told. We looked into soldering or taping the cord into the back of the modem - didn't find anything that would work. Then about halfway through the second day of noodling this out, I printed out the sign above and taped it to the back of the modem. We never saw another 900 number item on the bill.
That system is no longer in service, so I kept the sign as a memento. But I think I'm ready to toss it in the interest of a less cluttered workspace.