The lights are on, but no one is home

Search400.com member “Bud” shares his blunder:  

While recently putting the latest CUME & Hiper Group on our model 810, I experienced a failure for some PTF’s to apply for iSeries Access.  So, I downloaded what were the missing concurrent PTFs from Fix Central and tried to apply them.  It didn’t work, and at that point I couldn’t figure out what was going on so contacted IBM Support — on Saturday.  The contact guy sorted out what was going on, had me re-apply one of them and bounce the box.  Now, understand that at the time I was doing this I was talking to him (as in not paying attention to what I was doing).  He told me if I had any more issues to call him back.  So, for 45 minutes I’m staring at the front panel and everything looks normal to me (Normal mode: running on B side) except for a blinking light to the immediate right of the start button. 

In my defense, I was handed the job of software administration two years ago and have never performed any manual functions on the box. Anyway, to figure what the blinking light meant, I hunted it down at the infocenter (no mean feat) and read that it meant the “system has power.”  Also, since I’m in a room with lots of little fans spinning in lots of little boxes, the noise level is, well its noisy in there!  I finally caved in and called the guy back.  He said, “Um, your system isn’t powered up.”  But I see an illuminated panel and there’s power to the box.  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s powered up, it just means there’s power to the box,” he added. I felt like such an idiot.  Then he added, “Don’t feel bad, you wouldn’t believe the number of calls we receive on this.”

Do you have a blunder to share?