A four-hour system interruption in September at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri has been attributed to a cat jumping on a technician’s keyboard.

73 points
*

This is about as believable as “the dog ate my homework.”

permalink
report
reply
12 points

At least I know dogs that would do that…

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

I do have a fear of something like this happening and do not let my cat into the room when I’m working for this reason though.

I could believe it.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

One time my dog actually did eat my homework and I informed my teacher that he’d never believe the truth.

He said it actually happened to him once too and let me redo it. I’m lucky as fuck.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Trust it’ll be used as justification for RTO

permalink
report
parent
reply
71 points
*
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
reply
18 points
*

Yeah, anybody in IT knows this is bullshit. I guarantee these people had several holes in their processes, didn’t properly back things up, and have been accidentally losing data for YEARS. Somebody recently noticed it, so they decided to blame a cat.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

I’d wager on manager that decided to do something on the server.

permalink
report
parent
reply
59 points

Fuck the cat landed on my keyboard typed sudo rm -rf / --no-peserve-root and then pressed enter.

Yeah John blame it on the cat !!! We all have intrusive thoughts but don’t follow them through!!!

permalink
report
reply
12 points

I mean for all we know it might have been cat /dev/random > /var/lib/mysql/whatever.

permalink
report
parent
reply
50 points
*
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
reply
35 points

Many of your points are good, but 4 is pretty weak. I have left my personal laptop for 20 minutes to come back and find that the cat has put me into airplane mode, opened a hexadecimal calculator I didn’t know I had, written a complain to Microsoft that only didn’t send because of airplane mode (error popup and all), opened my family recipes, edited my family recipes to include actual text-symbol emojis among other garbage, and recorded the whole thing as a… Gamer Clip???

She does this routinely.

I disable my work laptop keyboard before I even LOOK away from it, I don’t want to find out how much damage she could push to production.

permalink
report
parent
reply
13 points

recorded the whole thing as a gamer clip

FILTHY PRANK

YOU JUST GOT, PRANKED BRO HAHA

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

I know! That was the most disrespectful part!!

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

Cats are the masters of the obscure keyboard shortcuts.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points
*
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
10 points
*
Removed by mod
permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

I taught my cats not to go on the keyboard. Took a while, but now two of them are very carefully stepping around it, and the third kinda does, but easily forgets when she gets excited.

Just consistently moving their paws off the keyboard when they try and go there, use “bad” voice, and putting them on floor if they continue. And “a while” was almost a year.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points
*
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

I love cats and would like to have one but I don’t because I also like to not have my things moved around or messed with at the whim of a bored animal.

I wish there was a way to have cat friends rather than pets, so they could come visit and I could let them in for a bit if it’s a good time and then they go off and do their cat things elsewhere.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
10 points

You talking about government systems here. Most were built before safeguards were a thing.

My wife works for a tax authority and she still has to use a green text on black background terminal with keyboard only interaction to review people’s taxes. Being one keystroke away from blowing away a database is not surprising.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

I always open up files in Vim because I can work with text much better than cat or less or whatever else.

But also I use git. For everything that is important.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

dG seems a lot more likely to be hit by a cat.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

But then she won’t exit Vim, so no harm done

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

This could be a case of the reporting not being 100% accurate though. I could easily see some cat-like typing going unnoticed in the wrong kind of config file mangling a config for a critical process and requiring recovering a server (or, say, a remote firewall >_>) from backup.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points
*
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
*

Guy was changing config, got up to get coffee, cat walked across keyboard, tech didn’t notice what the cat did and saved and reloaded?

Or config was in some gui and not from a bash terminal?

permalink
report
parent
reply
-1 points

Good to see all the armchair experts have shown up

permalink
report
parent
reply
31 points

Inappropriate use of cat

permalink
report
reply

Not The Onion

!nottheonion@lemmy.world

Create post

Welcome

We’re not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from…
  2. …credible sources, with…
  3. …their original headlines, that…
  4. …would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

Community stats

  • 5.1K

    Monthly active users

  • 979

    Posts

  • 35K

    Comments

Community moderators