It was Housekeeping Sunday in Dirk’s small IT shop, which usually meant taking their diminutive lot of servers down for routine maintenance. Dirk thought he’d change it up this week and add some actual cleaning to their housekeeping tasks. He knew just the man for the job too - Andrew, the Big Boss’s nephew.
Andrew couldn’t be trusted with much, but he was assigned to work with Dirk on this Housekeeping Sunday so he would have to be assigned a task he couldn’t possibly screw up. Several of the servers hadn’t been physically cleaned in a while and their dust bunnies had evolved in to full-blown Killer Rabbits of Caerbannog.

Dirk dispatched Andrew to the IT closet that doubled as the janitor’s storage room. “All the cleaning supplies you could possibly need are in there,” Dirk assured him. “Just use the cans of computer duster though. They should already have those little red straws jammed on to them and the label says ‘Electronics Duster’ in big letters. When you see dust, just point and shoot.”

“YES SIR!” Andrew shot back, with a sarcastic salute. Dirk brushed it off and went back to the remote firewall maintenance he was working on.

About half an hour later, Dirk’s phone buzzed on his desk with a text message from Andrew. “CAN U COME IN HERE?? Comps r broken.” It was immediately followed by a swarm of buzzes from email alerts about key servers not shutting down gracefully. Gravely concerned, Dirk rushed to the IT/Janitor closet in time to see Andrew stumble out of the room coughing and looking dazed.

“I don’t know what happened, man. I sprayed the stuff at the dust like you said, things started smoking, then the servers started crashing.” Andrew recounted.

“You should shut the servers down before you start opening them and spraying computer duster in there!” Dirk said, peering inside the closet. His nostrils were greeted with the scent of burning chemicals that were not native to cans of air. On the work bench he saw empty cans of WD–40 laying there, red straws and all.

“We should get some different cleaning junk, I don’t think that works right!” Andrew blurted out from behind him.

“For once, you’re right about something Andrew…” Dirk replied, as his head began to wrap around the fact that Housekeeping Sunday just became Disaster Control Sunday. But at least all the servers were now well-lubricated.

Ed. note: Someone (most specifically, me) did not get the next episode of TDWTF:Live! edited in time for this week. Our next episode, with John Lange, will appear next week. - Remy
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