“RTFM.” That’s what the IT guy in charge of PCs at my first job used to bark at everyone, as in “Read the (expletive) manual.” Some folks learn that one the hard way, such as our Off the Record author, a college student working in a corporate IT shop who saw new backup software as an opportunity to try his hand at upgrading. Everything seemed to go fine — only, it didn’t. I’ll cut to the chase: 30 days of data was not recoverable and paychecks had to go out the next day. “We got the HR staff, the new head of IT, and some of the other administrators and started manually entering the paychecks, printing and stuffing the envelopes by hand,” our author explains. After that, he read the manual and found the telling little piece of information. “I’m older and wiser now.”