# IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/it-boss-left-root-session-open-for-bring-your-kid-to-work-day/
- Published: 2026-08-03T06:30:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-08-03T06:48:22+00:00
- Original publisher: The Register
- Original article: https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/08/03/it-boss-left-root-session-open-for-bring-your-kid-to-work-day/5280931
- Topics: Software

## Key points

- IT boss left a root terminal unattended near his children
- His nine-year-old daughter typed "SHUTDOWN," mimicking a film
- Fixing the resulting damage took the boss 36 hours

## Summary

A veteran IT worker's Halloween goodwill gesture backfired spectacularly in the 1990s, according to a story shared with The Register's "Who, Me?" column. An IT boss at a company running an IBM RS/6000 Unix machine left his terminal logged in as root while his young children played in his office during a family-friendly trick-or-treating event, unwittingly exposing critical business systems to a curious nine-year-old.

The boss had started the day's data processing early to avoid disruption once the children arrived, then left the root-privileged terminal unattended. His daughter, having recently watched a film in which a girl saved the day by typing "SHUTDOWN" into a Unix system, decided to try it herself and proudly told her father it had "worked just like in the movie." The company's decades-old BASIC-based software, some of it 25 years old at the time, was left in disarray, and the boss reportedly spent 36 hours repairing the damage.

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Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.