scratch monkey

n. As in Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey , a
proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or
devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any
risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that
might otherwise get trashed. This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the
Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the
University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary
monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing
through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures
on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a DEC
field circus engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX
inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel.
It is reported that, after calming down an understandably irate customer
sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC troubleshooter
called up the field circus manager responsible and asked him sweetly, Can
you swim? Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of
the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain
clueless droids at the local humane society. The moral is clear: When in
doubt, always mount a scratch monkey. [The actual incident occured in 1979
or 1980. There is a version of this story, complete with reported dialogue
between one of the project people and DEC field service, that has been
circulating on Internet since 1986. It is hilarious and mythic, but gets
some facts wrong. For example, it reports the machine as a PDP-11 and
alleges that Mabel's demise occurred when DEC PM ed the machine. Earlier
versions of this entry were based on that story; this one has been corrected
from an interview with the hapless sysop.
