Back in college, I always made sure to be friendly with the operators (you get faster turn-around) and learned how to do their jobs. I'd spell them on occasion so they could hit the bathroom, get something to drink, etc. There was an established priority of 1) University business, 2) Instructor runs, 3) Student runs.

Operators had no override for University business, but could override student and instructor runs. When you'd issue an override, the current run would stop. Most of the instructors were kind enough to limit their submissions after 7:00 pm when they knew most students were trying to get time on the mainframe but if they had to put a run in, usually it was with 'whenever you get to it' instructions.
There was one prof who had recently transferred from another University and thought he was all that AND a bag of chips, so he would walk up and DEMAND priority and would be very insulting about the whole process and pretty much torqued off all the operators.
One day he came stalking up when I was behind the desk, killing time with the operator waiting for my run to finish, demanding in no uncertain terms that his run be submitted NOW! and, furthermore, the operator should kill any other runs so that his program would get more CPU time as it was a VERY IMPORTANT RUN!.

The operator looked at the guy and said (with a straight face) "Yes Sir! In fact, I'll give this priority 0 so that it comes before any Priority 1 runs"

The guy wandered off happy and the operator turned to me and said, "God, he's SUCH an idiot! Priority 0 means 'run this when there is absolutely nothing else going on'.

It took about a week for this guy's run to finish since it would get the 30 microseconds at 6:00 am when the mainframe shut everything down for it's maintenance runs and 30 microseconds at 8:00 am when those runs finished.

It amused us mightily

>>>One way to "get" a fellow programmer was to pull a card out of the middle of the deck without them knowing it.
>>
>>I remember case in senior high-school ;
>>
>>We used to write programs in fortran 4, and then we also had had to punch them on cards and pass through an aging IBM-369.
>>(We actually had punch-card machine in the ground-floor level)
>>Now if you did good algoritam/code you would get high grade. Who ever come up first with algoritam/solution would win also
>>daily code contest and would not have to code it (first you do the algoritam and then you actually code it!) and immediately get
>>high grade. |
>>
>>But there was also practice by teacher, to give high grade to anybody who would just pick winning algoritam solution off the clasroom table and punched it into cards. You come with printed listing and you get your high grade, which actually counted as any other high grade/score you get. This was a way to stimulate 'hardworkers' vs smart-arses I guess. <vbg>
>>
>>There was a guy who never did single winning algoritam, but nonetheless got many high grades, by simply taking solutions of the classroom table, and then spending hours to punch them and then consecutivelu take to computing center for processing.
>>(We would go there, submit the deck, and then wait couple of hours until task is processed and printout cames out... )
>>
>>So one day we had relatively easy math problem to code, which included variations or combinations (with repetition) up to certain N level. Well someone came up relatively quickly with algoritam solution, and had priviledge to win that day code code competition (was not me) and then he draw it to classroom table.
>>
>>So our 'hardworker' picked it up off the clasroom, coded it into actual Fortran 4 code and then he went down to punching room to
>>do his hardwork. Then he went to center with IBM369, submited his deck of cards and patiently waited for listing...
>>
>>But that day, something quiet out of ordinary has happened!;
>>Instead of one operater (in long white uniform) comming out from restricted area, entire GANG OF THEM came out,
>>screaming and looking for the 'author'.
>>They brought out pile of paper, nearly one meter in height!! Over thousand printed pages or so !!
>>
>>So what happened;
>>
>>While our 'hardworker' was punching cards in school punch-room, some of smart arses (we got few of those) in class intercepted his stack of cards while unattended, and actually switched card with line of code which decides 'N level' of itterations.
>>
>>So instead of being
>>
>>For i=1 to 4
>>.
>>next
>>
>>Basically he increased N (4) by one or two to 5 or 6.
>>But givem the nature of operation (combinations or variations with repetition don't remember)
>>Actual printout instead of being 20-30 pages (casual size of school task) became thousands of pages...
>>
>>They wanted to kill him !! {lol} So he got banned from computing center for the rest of the school year.
>>
>>* * *
>>
>>Perpetrator (not me!) was never discovered! Although few of us knew who did it ;)
>>
>>
>>Cheers :)
>
>I took a Fortran class in college. (That was about all you could take back then if you weren't a comp sci major). Each student had an account at the computer center, with each job you ran deducting "money" from the account. The idea was you had enough in your account to complete all the assignments but not enough to go hog wild like your schoolmate did. After finishing my last assignment I saw that my account still had a balance so decided to have a little fun. I wrote about a 6 line program with an infinite loop that printed "Bite me" or something clever like that and then ejected to the next page. They didn't have a print spooler so it went straight to the printer. It ran until it timed out or drained my account, one of the other. A red faced operator came bursting out of the computer room, saying "Which one of you dudes is Beane?" I kept my mouth shut, of course. He tried to attract me by putting the listing out. It must have been two feet high. Of course I didn't fall for that. He did report it to the prof but the prof didn't care. I already had an A in the class.