Practical jokes for mainframe systems programmers
This post was contributed by regular columnist, Robert Crawford. On the opposite end of our normal content, which provides helpful tips to smooth out your operations, this post is offered up for a bit of comedy. We encourage you to share your comments or your own practical jokes in the comments section at the end.
[Update: For those of you who missed the tongue in cheek nature of this post, it is in fact, a joke. Please don’t try this at work. — Matt Stansberry, Editor]
Work is getting to be too serious. Between the demand for 100% availability and doing more with fewer people, there is little room for those “water cooler” moments we used to enjoy. I say it’s time to revive joy in the workplace and build team spirit. This column suggests some practical jokes that will engender mirth and leave everyone in stitches.
Remap the 3270 emulator keyboard
When a colleague leaves his or her workstation unlocked our first temptation is to send a scathing e-mail to the CEO. But some situations call for something more subtle. Instead of a career-ending missive simply reprogram the victim’s 3270 keyboard mapping.
There are a lot of creative ways to do this. My favorite is to shift every key one to the right so that typing, “logon” will actually be “;phpm” on the screen. Keyboard macros also offer possibilities where a joker could map“left-shift-F1” to type, “tso delete sys1.linklib” and hit enter.
Rename ISPF profile dataset
The lowly ISPF profile dataset (ISPPROF) looks innocuous enough as a simple, 80 byte record library. However, over years of use it accumulates a user’s preferences, job card text, PF key assignments and favorite datasets. Most of us don’t realize how lost we would be without this saved information until it’s gone.
Make someone’s day by deleting his or her personal ISPPROF library. Be sure to stand near your victim’s cubicle so you can hear the hilarious exclamations of disbelief as he or she scrambles to recover. For extra points, be sure to delete any backups in Hierarchical Storage Manager (DFHSM).
DD Dummy a DBMS archive file
Each database management system (DBMS) from IMS to DB2 has an archival process that copies active log records onto tape or other media for safekeeping. Normally these archives aren’t needed except for database recoveries.
Someone with access to the archival JCL could alter the archive output dataset to DUMMY. The records are then copied off of the active logs, but are not saved. The records will soon be gone for good when, in a few hours, the DBMS comes around and overwrites the allegedly archived log.
Imagine how hard your database administrators (DBA’s) will laugh when they have to do a production database recovery only to find they have no records to do so. This also works in cases where a DBMS has to go into the archival logs to emergency restart.
Replace stand-alone dump (SAD)
SAD is the failure data capture tool of last resort designed to gather storage dumps when the system itself is so damaged it can’t recover. System-wide failures are rare nowadays but strict uptime requirements mean any full LPAR failures must be diagnosed on the first occurrence.
Messing with SAD isn’t easy as not everyone is prepared to do the type of primitive, low level programming required. However, a study of SAD’s structure and flow may allow a lesser programmer to cause mischief by replacing a CSECT or two.
There are a couple of variations on this joke. One tactic might be to replace the SAD prompts with questions such as, “What was that IPL volume again?” Another opportunity is to leave the prompts alone and execute enough code to keep the processor busy for the amount of time a SAD usually takes. But, instead of writing storage contents, fill the dump dataset with cheerful speculations about your coworkers’ personal lives. I’m sure IBM support will also appreciate your wit after a long day of looking at normal dumps.
Reinitialize database volumes
This practical joke comes with plausible deniability. After all, anyone could understand why a simple finger check or brain freeze might cause someone to reinitialize the wrong set of volumes.
What I like about this joke is the slow buildup. You can reinitialize the volumes at 08:00 in the morning. Nothing bad will happen immediately as the DBMS usually has the database datasets along with the necessary extent information. However, once the volumes are reinitialized they become available for allocation and the wide open spaces are too tempting of candidate volumes to System Managed Storage (SMS).
Accordingly, by 10:00 or so other datasets will start to pop up on the volumes. As they appear DBMS reports of missing records and I/O errors will trickle in. Soon the errors will become a flood just about the time the DBA’s realize what’s going on.
At that point you can explain your joke to the merriment of all. Better yet, you have your own topper when the DBA’s realize they can’t recover the databases because you dummied out the DBMS log archive a couple of days ago.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: For 24 years, Robert Crawford has worked off and on as a CICS systems programmer. He is experienced in debugging and tuning applications and has written in COBOL, Assembler and C++ using VSAM, DLI and DB2.
Posted: May 20th, 2008 under Mainframe operating systems and management.
Are you out of your freakin’ mind?!? Anyone who finds your “jokes” even remotely amusing should be locked up.
What you suggest could bring an entire enterprise to its knees. You’d get fired and guess who’d get stuck cleaning up the mess? People like me that work 10-12 hours a day 6 days a week keeping the mainframe running smoothly, that’s who.
You mess with my mainframe like that and I can promise you a world of hurt you won’t ever forget!!!
Comment by An old mainframer — May 21, 2008 @ 11:29 am
You VM guys (are there any left) try this one:
/* */ “SET OUTPUT” C2X(SUBSTR(”WXYZEFGHMNKIJORQPSTUVABCDvxyzefghmnklijorqpstuabcd9032465178″,SUBSTR(TIME(),7,2)+1,1)) SUBSTR(”ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789″,SUBSTR(TIME(),7,2)+1,1)
bury this is a frequently executed EXEC and watch the fun.
Comment by Kelly Vogt — May 21, 2008 @ 11:47 am
This one is good too:
/* */
PARSE UPPER ARG VICTIM STOOGE MSGX
PARSE VAR MSGX WORD1 WORDX
STOOGE = SUBSTR(STOOGE,1,8,’ ̵
IF WORD1 = “AT” THEN MSGX = “‘” || MSGX || “‘”
JOKETIME = TIME()
JOKE = JOKETIME||” * MSG FROM “||STOOGE||”: “||MSGX
MSGNOH VICTIM JOKE
It takes a little more authority to do this.
Comment by Kelly Vogt — May 21, 2008 @ 11:50 am
These aren’t practical jokes, this is IT terrorism. Any one of these should result in a shiny pair of steel bracelets.
Comment by Support Guy — May 21, 2008 @ 11:51 am
Are you trying to get people fired?
Comment by A. Nony Mouse — May 21, 2008 @ 12:01 pm
This has to be satire right? You started off well, though my eyebrows rose with deleting sys1.linklib. Then it went downhill from there. Any one of these ‘jokes’ would cause serious costs to the business IT is supposed to be supporting. That can only mean that this article was a joke right? Right?
Comment by Mainframe Geek — May 21, 2008 @ 12:05 pm
It seems that some people missed the joke here. The author isn’t advocating anyone actually try these things. It was written as satire, for entertainment purposes only, sorry for the confusion.
Comment by mstansberry — May 21, 2008 @ 12:13 pm
If nothing else, this should spark a discussion around systems vulnerability.
Comment by mstansberry — May 21, 2008 @ 12:14 pm
Too many 10-12 hours * 6 days a week, I suspect, to appreciate the humor. Obviously, it’s only funny until someone actually does it.
Comment by Kelly Vogt — May 21, 2008 @ 12:17 pm
Fired, Go directly to JAIL.
And SearchDataCenter.com I am really taken back that your organization would even stoop to publishing such distructive actions and call them JOKES!!!
Comment by Ygtabkidden — May 21, 2008 @ 12:20 pm
[…] Robert Crawford has a post over at Server Specs about practical jokes for mainframe programmers. That got me thinking about all the stuff that I’ve been witness to: […]
Pingback by UNIX Practical Jokes : Bob Plankers, The Lone Sysadmin — May 21, 2008 @ 12:30 pm
There is nothing funny about this article, satire or otherwise. Exposing vulnerabilities of mainframe systems, where trusted system programmers have access to important datasets, is simply malicious. It takes a real jerk to kick an operating system when it’s down. Dare you to write something equally damaging and ill-intentioned about Unix.
Comment by Suzette Gautier — May 21, 2008 @ 12:44 pm
For any fools who can’t take a joke get off of planet earth.
You are the same ones that turned Bugs Bunny form something side splitting to mudane.
Comment by vtamguy — May 21, 2008 @ 12:52 pm
Compared to some of the things I’ve seen the last 25 years this is tame.
However, it didn’t use to be a big deal when you had weekly TCM failures, weekly human errors and multiple IPL’s a week.
(Ted boxed the tape drives again, all 48 of them). (The 3330 device FD ate both the history primary and backup disk packs).
When reliability arrived we went real-time and high availability what was humorous became serious and possibly even criminal.
Now we’re down to ID-10-T and PBU&K humor.
Comment by Mark S. — May 21, 2008 @ 12:59 pm
What a bunch of weenies. Any one simple enough to try any of this stuff deserves to be fired along with the security admin. Anyone who can’t laugh at how some of this stuff might have been accidently discovered really can’t call themselves a systems programmer.
Now if you really want to set someone’s teeth on edge, try updating the VTOC with a dataset name that has an unprintable or blank character in it, or give it a size that is larger than the drive. Let someone chew on that for a while.
Comment by AnOldDinosaur — May 21, 2008 @ 1:06 pm
So, this is sort of a “Darwin Test”. If you are stupid enough to try these, then: “You! out of the employed pool; into the job pool”. They are what Heinlein called “Funny Once”. Unfortunately “wrong” is infinite and “right” is very much finite. Just compare the number of bad programs, spam, and virii against the number of well written programs.
Comment by John Mattson — May 21, 2008 @ 1:36 pm
Just think of it as a horror flick rather than a joke. But seriously, I’ve seen some of this stuff done, back in the “old days”, when people had a sense of humor. Back before greedy executives got $10,000 bonuses for improving uptime from 98% to 99% while overworked and underpaid system programmers struggled to maintain their composure dealing with the stresses of incompetent operators, ignorant users, and arrogant managers. Back before political correctness. No destruction of data, but producing weird output on people’s userids was occasionally done as a reminder to people not to leave an active terminal unlocked and unattended. I believe we were actually doing management a favor in that regard.
Comment by Ima Sysprog — May 21, 2008 @ 2:16 pm
Concerning fun with VTOCs: 1) zero out any of the format 1 ids, or 2) change the dataset name in the format 1 DSCB but not in the VTOCIX - or vice versa, or 3) change all of the extent pointers to all map the first extent (or any variation of that you can think of), or 4) modify the DSORG to include U - and the list goes on.
If you can’t take a joke, don’t mess with the clown.
Comment by ironarmadillo — May 21, 2008 @ 2:23 pm
This isn’t funny, its flaming hilarious, and to all those out there who fail to see a funny side go back into your spinloop & rotate. Thats the advantage of working on mainframes - weve had 50 years to think of pranks
Comment by Mike x — May 21, 2008 @ 3:18 pm
Even the suggestion of throwing hundreds of hours of users and colleagues work down the toilet and destroying the company you work for is just not funny. This is just sick.
Comment by OldCICSSysprog — May 21, 2008 @ 4:33 pm
This reminds me of a joke pulled on a fellow student (whose last name happened to be Phelps) a large number of years ago. We had a time sharing system (with a tractor paper feed terminal) where you were allow a designated amount of computer time a week. His account was set one day to start outputting a “Mission Impossible” briefing starting “Good Morning Mr. Phelps” when he logged on and the ability to interrupt the session was disabled. The Briefing ended with the statement “IN 5 SECONDS YOUR TIME FOR THE WEEK WILL SELF-DESTRUCT” and it started to page eject advance the paper typing the 5-4-3-2-1 count down and then logging him off. Until his account was reset his remaining time was 0 minutes.
Comment by Robert A. Rosenberg — May 21, 2008 @ 5:06 pm
What is wrong with people? Where is your sense of humour? Did anybody read the disclaimer?
Comment by Ted MacNEIL — May 21, 2008 @ 5:35 pm
The ISPF Profile Dataset reminded of a trick I played on another sysprog. I changed his ISPF PF7/PF8 keys from UP/DOWN to “C U=userid” (his own userid). Everytime he went into SDSF to view the log and tried to scroll, he got cancelled off. First thing he did was log back on; go into SDSF and tried to view the log to see who cancelled him. You guessed it, he cancelled himself again. After the third time, he went to the hard-log (we had it back then) and paged through. When he saw he was cancelled by himself the look on his face was PRICELESS. I was rolling on the floor laughing so hard it was easy to figure out who did it.
Ah, a sense of humor is required for a good sysprog.
Comment by Russell Witt — May 21, 2008 @ 9:18 pm
I was quite annoyed by this rubbish. Not because it’s obviously a joke, but because the writer forgot the first thing about witty or funny writing… That is it should have some wit or humour. He is wasting our time and bandwidth with this puerile “satire”.
Hint for author… if you are going to write a funny article please spend more than 30 seconds on it.
Comment by Richard Lennox — May 22, 2008 @ 6:26 am
Great humor! People who think this isn’t funny need not apply to my shop. Get a Life (great TV show), you humorless incompetents. I have 30+ years of experience in the mainframe world - this is hilarious and only presents the tip of the iceberg!
Comment by R.V. Bond — May 22, 2008 @ 8:02 am
Hello.
Some years ago, on 1 April, as system programmer :
I changed the “TSO prof nopref” in common logon procs
to a “pref(xx)” giving in ISPF Edit for anybody :
“data set not found” …
and a lot of people coming quickly in my office.
Comment by LOOTEN — May 22, 2008 @ 8:40 am
This was humor and it was disclaimed upfront. Those of you posting about not seeing the humor in this simply take yourselves too seriously. Lighten up.
Comment by Another Mainframer — May 22, 2008 @ 9:26 am
So funny I forgot to laugh .
Comment by Not Mel Brooks — May 22, 2008 @ 9:47 am
Comment number 3 reminds me of what a system programmer friend of mine did on his VM system. It seems a co-worker arrived at work on Monday morning boasting of his exploits over the weekend. The system programmer wrote a little exec to simulate a “message from God”. The bad boy got the following message on his terminal:
* MSG FROM GOD: Repent!
Unnerved, the recipient issued the expected command:
Q GOD
to which he received the reply
GOD not logged on
How could he get a message from a userid that did not exist on the system? He didn’t do any more bragging about his exploits after that.
Comment by Ima Sysprog — May 22, 2008 @ 11:47 am
This post reminds me of a special I saw on NBC’s Dateline about nuclear reactor security in the U.S. (PDF transcript). Basically, they exposed all these vulnerabilities that, say, a terrorist could exploit. Let me tell you, it was scary (fear-mongering being a separate and equally large topic). If a malicious admin runs code that shuts down the mainframe, chaos would certainly ensue. Not to trivialize the significance of such an event, but people would probably end up getting fired but it would be unlikely that anyone would die.
Where am I going with this? The purpose of NBC’s report was to expose some very scary stuff to draw attention to the fact that these things need to be fixed. Sure, people were upset about the report and their comments are not unlike what I’ve seen on this post. Whether or not Robert posted this list of “practical jokes” out of satire or journalistic audacity is beside the point (in my mind, anyway).
Hopefully, this draws attention from IBM and mainframe admins to address vulnerabilities in our computer systems. Even if you disagree with the context in which Robert posted this blog or the background leading to it, I think it is worthwhile to get this discussion going.
Comment by Adam Trujillo — May 22, 2008 @ 1:37 pm
Nice to see the spirit of the BOFH lives on.
Comment by Network technician — May 22, 2008 @ 4:13 pm
Hi, the first joke on the list I used about 12 years ago on our Department Practical Joker and as far as Hardware of software we didn’t go much further (due to possible consequences that a lot of the comment writers FEAR). Other, quite funny at the time, Jokes include:
1) We had a regular reference Document printed each month, it was pretty big and weighed about 3-4 Kilos. This docu. found it’s way into the bosses Tennis Kitbag once every two months and he noticed it normally first at the Tennis court.
2) The Holepunch was emptied into the emergency umbrella, a good one but one you often had to wait for the effects
3) Connecting someones (the Bosses) office chair with thin cord under the desk to the telephone is hilarious. When the victim comes in and wants to sit down, the phone suddenly vanishes off the back side of the desk (with quite good sound effects)
4) Unplugging the telephone handset and making it look like it’s plugged in is interesting.. lots of hello, hello, hello when the next call comes in. This seems to also work for all sorts of cable connections, keyboard, mouse, LAN, etc
5) Dummy keys from an old keyboard,with the stem at the back cut off, put into an existing keyboard don’t seem to work
properly.
6) A self inflicted joke was when one of our users played with the default colours and had blue text on a blue background.
and the list goes on
Comment by rolf parker — May 23, 2008 @ 3:20 am
Lighten up people!
I was a victim of a few practical jokes in the 1980s when life was simpler and people had time to gather around the water cooler. A coworker reversed IBM puchcards in the IBM 29 card/keypunch when I was not present. I began keying not noticing the cards should all have top left corner angle matching. After submitting the card deck and receiving a “Message not accepted nor relayed” error message a few times, I looked and found the error. Thereafter, I used to check before keypunching card decks to make sure all cards were in the correct direction in the bin.
This practical joking seemed to escalate, casters were (one - usually) removed from an office chair and the side where it was removed from, was set facing away so the unsuspecting victim would just sit down. Phone cords were disconnected, and the phones would ring and you’d pick up the phone to answer the call only to have the phone still ringing. Again things continued to escalate, removing ink cartridges from pens, or breaking lead in pencils. Eventually, one spent 5 minutes inspecting your office/desk area for sabotage, before beginning work. One day I retaliated by purposely spilling coffee on some reports, using paper clips to keep cords in position, removed ink, broke pencil lead, all while one employee watched the destruction in progress (retaliation) and did not tip off the victim when that person returned to his office area.
The collateral damage reached a level, the oiriginal instigator of the practical jokes finally yelled out “Truce, Trice!”
The ink cartridges were “relocated” and installed in the pens again, the pencils were resharpened, the chair casters were reinstalled, no personal injury occured to anyone (fortunately!), and the only loss was the paper report, that could be reproduced and sent on the the proper people.
Comment by Gary Miller — May 24, 2008 @ 11:24 am
Many years ago we ran a utility program to cleanup DASD. This utility would scratch datasets that were not cataloged. Were you the person who changed the program to delete the datasets that were cataloged. We had a lot of available DASD space after it was run that way once. And yes the person who did it was fired and the reason was not doing a change control.
Comment by G Lang — May 27, 2008 @ 5:21 pm
In august of 1984 I was an MVS mainframer (and Honeywell DPS 6 engineer too) until I was recruited to be the responsible to start and develop the whole “departmental project” on the city governement of Barcelona (Ajuntament de Barcelona, www.bcn.es).
My work mates, DOS/VS-CICS-ICCF programmers, thought PCs were toys, not professional tools, and liked to use testing PC as games platform for fun time.
It was the time of Microsoft Flight Simulator version 1, MS Multiplan, Lotus 123 v1.1, and some months ago, dBase III 1.0.
But the testing PC was also my own workplace and I was tired to see people gaming on it as soon as I left my place to go to talk with my boss.
One friday I decided to add some “fun” lines to the AUTOEXEC.BAT in order to scare my PC guests that doesn’t know anything about PCs
I insert a closed loop at the end with several comment lines:
REM **** INTERNAL SYSTEM ERROR ****
REM **** CALL YOUR SYSTEMS PROGRAMMER ****
Next monday I received a phone call from the big boss (CIO): “Alex, take a look on the PC, last friday when I was trying to start Flight Simulator I received a system error”.
Take care with jokes at work!
Alex G
rocral2 (at) yahoo (dot) es
Comment by Alex G — May 30, 2008 @ 4:46 am
Just proves that most mainframers are a pretty sad bunch of humorless propeller heads! However, they ain’t anywhere as bad as UNIX geeks, and I aint even gonna mention Linux!
Comment by LMAO — May 31, 2008 @ 6:09 am
Somes jokes I’ve seen:
1. ISPPROF - change all of your view settings to reverse pink, then copy them into everyone elses. Watch the fun as people go blind and cough hot drinks onto their keyboards.
2. ISP@PRIM - I did a melting screen so that what ever option you selected from the main menu ran my exec which flashed multiple menu’s making it look like your main menu was melting. The only option that worked was to logoff!
3. WTOR’s to the console. For new operators we would chuck a WTOr to the master console with words like “HASPFOOL JES2 Catastrophic abend. Please enter your password and hit enter twice” then we would laugh at them in a cruel and derisery fashion until they cried.
4. EREP with console commands. A gifted op once figured out you can place console commands ahead of a jcl card in a proclib member, which also ment the command echo or output would not appear in the job. His mistake was a typo in a SE command so that instead of just one person getting the message, everyone who was logged on got the message “The phantom piddler has struck again”. It took the MVS sysprogs an age to find the bug.
5. selling the mainframe. working for a large bank I once put the mainframe up for sale. In tjhose days we had a 3090J, and as the advertisements were typed up by non-tecjhnical staff they thought nothing of it. My add read “For Sale, 1 x 3090J, in blue and beige. comes with its own carry-bag and compatible with most atari’s. $200 ono. I then used my colleagues contact details. Apparently it was mentioned at board level and my mate was given a stern telling off. Hilarious!
Comment by Dave M — December 8, 2008 @ 7:42 pm