An On Call reader for The Register, nicknamed "Socrates," recounted an early career episode as a fresh-faced software manager sent to a power station to document an undocumented monitoring system. Confronted with poorly written, uncommented control code for a turbine overspeed detector, he judged the risk of accidentally causing a catastrophic failure too great and chose to walk away rather than attempt a fix, leaving the system untouched.

Socrates found the code riddled with random GOTO statements, arbitrary memory address accesses, and unexplained bitwise operations, with no comments to clarify its purpose. Fearing that a mistake could trigger a turbine overspeed event, potential equipment damage, or even a wider blackout, he decided the safest course was to back away from the keyboard entirely and leave the system as it was, a decision he now regards as a valuable early lesson in professional judgement.