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.
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.
This sounds like bull shit for many reasons.
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.
FILTHY PRANK
YOU JUST GOT, PRANKED BRO HAHA
I know! That was the most disrespectful part!!
Cats are the masters of the obscure keyboard shortcuts.
It says the technician was reviewing a config. I can only assume that means actively reviewing it. The cat shouldn’t have had 20 minutes to screw around. With 20 minutes I get it, but not what should have only been a few seconds.
If he left his desk, he should lock his workstation or disconnect the keyboard, like you mentioned, as I’m sure this isn’t the first time the cat went for the keyboard.
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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.
I’m allergic to cats, so I try not to spend too much time around them. Even if I wasn’t allergic, having a cat getting into everything would drive me insane. If it jumped on my keyboard one time, that would pretty much be in. Banned from the office. I’d be a terrible pet owner.
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.
There are cat cafes in the states too. Usually linked to adoptions.
Japan has cat cafes, you can have some coffee and hang out with a bunch of cats. They have things like this with a bunch of different animals actually.
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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.
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.
dG seems a lot more likely to be hit by a cat.
But then she won’t exit Vim, so no harm done
Alright,
dGZZ.I need a video of a cat playing twister on a keyboard right now
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.
If he was at the keyboard when it happened, he surely would have know there were changes made that he needed for correct, right?
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?
Good to see all the armchair experts have shown up