Safety? Working servers? Who wants these when you’ll be able to have a shiny flooring?

Who, Me? Ah, mild reader, as soon as once more it’s Monday and all that entails. However concern not, For The Reg is right here with Who, Me? and one other story of issues going not fairly so properly as may need been hoped. Maybe it will elevate your day.

This week’s raconteur, who we’ll Regomize as “Murph,” brings us a story tying collectively two of our latest themes: safety tech that does not behave because it ought to, and energy factors being utilized in methods they weren’t meant to be.

Murph works in an older constructing that is been renovated, with “marble entry and tasteful carpeting within the work areas.” The server room inhabits a repurposed gymnasium (no servers below the break room bench right here) and there are tiled flooring in every single place. In actual fact, “with a lot of tile throughout seven flooring, we have now a good measurement upkeep workers to maintain it trying good.”

Now as you may think in a facility like that, completely different workers have entry to completely different areas. Safety fobs be sure that folks go solely the place they’re meant to. All properly and good.

Till at some point, when a brand new member joined the upkeep workers. Respectable bloke. Conscientious. Onerous employee. Properly favored.

For some cause – we are going to doubtless by no means know the explanation – when this new affable cleaner signed on, he was not given the usual safety fob that upkeep workers have been issued. He was given an outdated fob that had previously belonged to a retired member of the IT staff. Clearly it is a drawback for a bunch of causes. However that is not the place our story ends.

The brand new man was requested to wash the flooring within the IT division. All properly and good – and together with his super-powered fob he may clear much more of it than anybody anticipated.

Take, for instance, that former gymnasium, with its expanse of dingy tile that hadn’t had polish in who is aware of how lengthy.

That grime was simply nice, as a result of it is well-known that mops and knowledge facilities do not combine.

Carefully – diligently, even – he plugged his industrial flooring polisher in to an influence board labelled “A”. Because it turned out, this linked to the “A” rack of uninterruptible energy provides.

“9 minutes and twenty-three seconds later (confirmed later by the logs and surveillance system),” Murph tells us, “alarm emails and cellular phone vibrating sensor alerts have been despatched out” because the UPS batteries have been depleted by the surprising load.

Murph obtained his alert and dashed to the server room, arriving simply in time to cease the extremely motivated cleaner from diligently – carefully, even –plugging within the polisher (which had misplaced energy when the UPS died) to the rack labelled “B”.

It is a story wherein not one factor however a number of needed to go mistaken – however it has a contented ending. You see, that “B” rack of UPSes stored every thing going. Despite the alarms and alerts and whooping sirens (OK, there weren’t whooping sirens) the system stayed up and labored because it ought to.

Between a popular cleaner and an nameless screw-up in HR, the system was given one heck of a stress take a look at, and handed. Murph simply hopes it would not occur once more.

Sadly we’re not sure if the server room flooring ever obtained that much-needed polish.

Have you ever ever given a system a much-needed if unintentional stress take a look at? Inform us all about your exploits in an e mail to Who, Me? and we’ll inform the world.