On Call By Friday presses the weight of the world down on even the most enthusiastic IT professional, which is why The Register is using the last day of the work week to lighten the load with a new installment of On Call – the reader-contributed column in which we tell your stories of struggling under tech support burdens.
Donkey Kong Country Returns: Weighty Way 6-3 (Puzzle Pieces, KONG Letters Guide, Walkthrough)
This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as "Harp" and in the 1980s worked for an insurance company that ran an exotic database coded in Fortran.
"The system had lots of cables, data points and the like that ran under a raised floor in a sealed, heavily air-conditioned room, with a line back to the mainframe," Harp explained.
So tangled and elongated were the things under the raised floor that the system was known as "Snuffleupagus" – after the Sesame Street character who has fur, a sort of trunk, no ears and maybe looks like a woolly mammoth.
