Techie Ran Up $40,000 Bill Trying To Download A Driver

Who, Me? Welcome to another week in the world of work, and therefore also to another edition of Who, Me? It’s The Register’s Monday reader-contributed column in which you admit to the error of your ways.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “William,” who like many of you got his first taste of computers from behind the keyboard of a Commodore Amiga.

“I loved it!” he told Who, Me? “I played games, music, and learned coding in BASIC and C.”

As the Amiga waned, and William entered the workforce, he took the plunge and bought a PC.

His Amiga upbringing meant he found Windows unsatisfactory, and decided to run IBM’s OS/2 instead, partly because he preferred it and partly because it was the operating system in place at work.

William used OS/2 happily for years, but one day he discovered that he needed to update a driver. This story took place in the dialup age, so while William could access the internet at home – and did so to find the driver he needed – he still lived with his parents and they would not appreciate having their sole phone line occupied for the several hours required to download anything of substance. William also hoped to avoid a big phone bill, so he decided to download the update at work and bring it home to install.

That plan seemed feasible because William’s employer accessed patches for its own OS/2 boxes by sending an email to an automated inbox that would parse incoming requests and then reply with the relevant code. The patch delivery service would break up large files into 1.4-megabyte chunks so they could fit on the floppy disks of the day.

William used certain tools to concatenate the files sent in this fashion, and then build them into a binary. He’d done this at work, so felt confident he could get the patch he needed for his home PC without attracting undue attention.

He therefore sent a request for a software update, but made an important error.

“I requested the whole of the latest update to OS/2 – the whole OS – instead of the updated driver,” he confessed.

In the coming days, William’s inbox swelled with hundreds of emails, each containing a 1.4MB attachment.

At the end of the month, his boss asked him to explain a £30,000 (US$40,000) jump in the company’s comms bill.

William responded that he was downloading an update to OS/2 – which was true – but didn’t explain the real reason.

“He scowled at me, and told me not to do it again,” he told Who, Me? And he also admitted that he never took his download home, either.

What’s the most expensive mistake you’ve made without consequences?

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