From the JargonFile:

'''scratch monkey''' n. As in "Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey", a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise get trashed.

This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology.  Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a DEC engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX
inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel.

It is reported that, after calming down an understandably irate customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC troubleshooter called up the field circus manager responsible and asked him sweetly, "Can you swim?"

Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain clueless droids at the local "humane" society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a scratch monkey.

See http://www.mv.com/ipusers/arcade/monkey.htm for more information. If this story is true, the people involved were *grossly* negligent in using an inherently unsafe hardware setup.
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This story is mounted in large print on the rack that holds our production servers. It surprises me that more people aren't familiar with the phrase and the story. 

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CategoryStory