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.