Recently, USC said that they were taking four student time sharing systems down to be "permanently decomissioned (turned off)". Being the curious (and bored) sort, I decided to be on Nunki (one of the affected systems) as shut-off time was near. At 12:45pm, I got the following message: NUNKI down in 15 minutes at 13:00 for 2780 days and 10 hours for decomissioning Now I know that mainframes are complicated machines, but I didn't know that they were so complicated that it took over seven and a half years to turn one off...
(From the "Rest" of RHF)