Early/mid-80's, I was employed as a "junior operator" in a pretty well outfitted computer operations center, the kind with raised tiles and an on-duty human available 24/7 to service international offices' other computer operations .. so as a teenage programmerhacker whose codes mere presence was highly odious to the senior operators, that meant I was really only allowed to be the tape monkey and the halon test subject, the crawl-space cable stuffer, the 30-minute bus-ride to another office' midnight switch-flicker, anything really, to have kept me logged off so the operators could do their operate.

So .. this one time, I was involved in a project to replace a thousand dumb terminals RS232 lines with ethernet throughout a labyrinthine maze of inner ducts and panels and routing networks and old-school inter-building telecoms cable channels, and so on. A job considered worthy of me, per the senior operators, since I had failed to find the bugs in the RS232-link that had necessitated (triggered) this upgrade to ethernet in the first place, greybeard grin. I didn't write the RS232 code they were using, I just complained about it too loudly this one time and it was, therefore, forever mine.

As a result of those bastard operators and their fetish for overalls, I can still do base-T muscle memory in the dark, and .. this one particular time .. finding myself buried deep in some dusty fan-duct that had required circus-like machinations to get into, stringing cables in the guts of the building .. my only flashlight falls out of my mouth and breaks itself on one of the thousands of sharp pointy things keeping building tiles from falling on us in places like banks with high ceilings and hospitals with low, dense ones, and so on.

So for a second I glimpse darkness and ponder the future 15 minute ordeal getting back across the ducts and to our exit-spot mostly blind and having to follow my new cable run by hand and make sure everything was set.

I foolishly yell back to my fellow duct-puller colleague, a relatively untrustworthy teenager like me at the time, who - doing an apprenticeship "network operation" at 3am in the morning, sitting there waiting for us to immediately leave after this - has absolutely no time for my shit and wants to get down from the ladder we have wisely put on top of another ladder in the depths of the basement, in order to get access to this ceiling hell-hole in which I was in danger of inhabiting permanently.

He sticks his head barely through the ceiling tile, up at me, and throws the only thing he has at hand with a light, his HP calculator, somehow chucking it right at my general direction long enough that I can see the thing and reach it before he stops letting dim light in around his neck, and so .. I type in 8888888 and use its feeble display light to crawl my way back through the ducts, a foot at a time .. to check my cable run .. by hand.

And, inevitably, those little dinky LED's help me find a kink in this one particular 'infamous' RS232 bundle which, unawares to us dopey copper tuggers, had been a key link in the chain leading to our brand new ethernet cable going in at an angle, cable shield cut open on a steel duct blade edge, which also had remnants of the old RS232 bundle, the missing trunks. WTF.

So .. by law .. we had to pull another length of cable, so back I go, down the precarious ladders bearing super bad news, past the fuming fellow dungeon crawler and our boss, getting wind of the troubles our ladders were in, and so we got the spare flashlight out of the van, another hour or so off schedule before the early-birds come to work .. and back into the depths, one more time, dagnabit.

Well, for weeks after that, I thoroughly loved annoying the greybeard operators that I, geniously, debugged the network problems with a calculator. Fellow junior op got his HP back, but I still don't think he'll know how to use it.