• (cs)

    OK, are we gonna use Discourse or not?

    She's the Frist line of defense!

  • Coward (unregistered) in reply to ubersoldat
    ubersoldat:
    OK, are we gonna use Discourse or not?

    She's the Frist line of defense!

    All signs point to no.

  • ANON (unregistered)

    Which RAID-Level is required to stand a bazooka attack?

  • Walky_one (unregistered) in reply to ANON
    ANON:
    Which RAID-Level is required to stand a bazooka attack?
    I'd say this strongly depends on the location of the individual disks... otherwise any level (except 0) would do.

    But honestly: I'd really like to know the original version of the story...

  • Pista (unregistered) in reply to Walky_one
    Walky_one:
    But honestly: I'd really like to know the original version of the story...

    Yeah, me too... Not that this version is not funny, but I'd let it to Scott Adams, to make a good Sunday strip out of it.

  • warreng (unregistered)

    I call BS on this one. In early 2000, no IT people were looking for jobs - they were all too busy laughing from the amount of money they made out of Y2K.

  • Derp (unregistered)

    I liked the snoofle stories better before their mandatory TDWTF embellishments.

  • (cs)

    There's something to be said for having your servers upstairs. A friend of mine once did disaster recovery for a firm that had a basement full of mainframes. These had the main cooling fans in the bottom, which blew air up through the racks. Unfortunately a main sewer burst, flooding the floor, and the fans continued to run for a while....

  • (cs)

    Bazooka proof,maybe. Would it survive a hit from a GAU-8??

  • (cs)

    I worked at a company where they placed the two data centres far enough apart that if a plane crashed into one (we were near an airport) and bounced, it would not hit the second.

  • Franky (unregistered)
    These racks need to be upstairs; this way if the server room is destroyed, they'll be safe - with us
    except then the lower room is _not_ the server room and the upper room is ... and you will be in the middle of the destruction!
  • (cs)
    they'll be safe - with us

    I found this funny. Do this guys go to work with an AK-47 and full combat gear or are they simply going to hug very very very hard their servers 'til "the battle for the racks" is over?

  • Sometimes Armed is Normal (unregistered) in reply to ubersoldat
    ubersoldat:
    they'll be safe - with us

    I found this funny. Do this guys go to work with an AK-47 and full combat gear or are they simply going to hug very very very hard their servers 'til "the battle for the racks" is over?

    Have you never had to go to work to do programming while also being armed? It's an odd feeling, trust me!

  • Anon (unregistered)
    During the interview, the development team was ready to hire him when one of the bosses burst into the room and interrupted the interview to introduce himself. When he discovered that Clint had an IT background, he became very excited.

    He was interviewing with the development team. What other background would he of had? Also, they had a development team. Surely they had IT backgrounds too.

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Also, they had a development team. Surely they had IT backgrounds too.

    Well....

  • John (unregistered) in reply to Roby McAndrew

    Reminds me of trying to remote diagnosis for a firm of estate agents who were having trouble with their server. Network was an OS/2 server in the basement, plus various OS/2 and MS-DOS clients spread around the building.

    The symptoms they were reporting about problems with the server didn't seem to make any sense, until someone at our end asked "Are you really sure nothing has happened there which might be causing problems?". The reply was, "No - it should be fine. All the water has been pumped out of the basement now."

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Also, they had a development team. Surely they had IT backgrounds too.

    You must be new here. Let me explain: No.

  • neminem (unregistered)

    Dumb. Exaggerated to the point where, while I would be curious to know what the submitted story actually looked like (if there even was one), I'm sure it had almost nothing to do with the extremely-fictional story that was posted. Anonymization is fine, writing a loosely-based-on-reality fantasy story is not so much. We came here to read WTFs in IT, not WTFs in story anonymization.

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to Raedwald
    Raedwald:
    I worked at a company where they placed the two data centres far enough apart that if a plane crashed into one (we were near an airport) *and bounced*, it would not hit the second.
    As long as they are only taking *accidental* crash trajectories of *civilian* plains into consideration.
  • (cs)

    The former Computing Centre of the Eindhoven University of Technology was designed to have the computers (i.e. mainframes) on the first floor (for Americans: the second floor). Because computers were large and heavy, and easily filled a room, this floor was very heavily constructed, with massive pillars to bear the load.

    What they didn't think of is that computers got much smaller and lighter very rapidly, which left them with a massively over-engineered building (bit like the Forth Bridge), with the mainframes on the ground floor.

  • (cs)

    Worst story ever!

  • (cs) in reply to camelotbob
    camelotbob:
    Wrost story ever!
    FTFY
  • Frank (unregistered) in reply to Roby McAndrew
    Roby McAndrew:
    There's something to be said for having your servers upstairs. A friend of mine once did disaster recovery for a firm that had a basement full of mainframes. These had the main cooling fans in the bottom, which blew air up through the racks. Unfortunately a main sewer burst, flooding the floor, and the fans continued to run for a while....

    So, the uh... It hit the fan?

  • (cs) in reply to Sometimes Armed is Normal
    Sometimes Armed is Normal:
    ubersoldat:
    they'll be safe - with us

    I found this funny. Do this guys go to work with an AK-47 and full combat gear or are they simply going to hug very very very hard their servers 'til "the battle for the racks" is over?

    Have you never had to go to work to do programming while also being armed? It's an odd feeling, trust me!

    Here, we call it "Monday".

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to ubersoldat
    ubersoldat:
    OK, are we gonna use Discourse or not?

    I can obviously not answer for everyone else, but I'm not gonna use it at least.

  • Flip-flop Wearer (unregistered) in reply to Zacrath
    Zacrath:
    Anon:
    Also, they had a development team. Surely they had IT backgrounds too.

    You must be new here. Let me explain: No.

    Let me flip the situation around, still no.

    My replacement for one position had a technical background but no development background. He had done training videos explaining the details on how to use a piece of software. but had never built anything or coded a single line.

  • (cs) in reply to Flip-flop Wearer
    Flip-flop Wearer:
    Zacrath:
    Anon:
    Also, they had a development team. Surely they had IT backgrounds too.

    You must be new here. Let me explain: No.

    Let me flip the situation around, still no.

    My replacement for one position had a technical background but no development background. He had done training videos explaining the details on how to use a piece of software. but had never built anything or coded a single line.

    That sounds like most of the developers at WTF-Inc.

    @others: the story is fairly close to the submission. Pretty much only the nationalities of the folks involved and the size of the secretary were changed.

  • (cs)

    Maybe no Elbonians, but --

    I worked as a developer during my college years at the University of Minnesota (a long time ago now). One day my manager rushed into our room and grabbed me and the other two devs, and ran down the hall into the server room.

    Someone had scheduled some construction in the server room; said construction to start with a concrete saw making a large square hole in the floor. In the server room. In the server room with lots of expensive servers running. Which would have filled the room with concrete dust. Which would have ruined said servers.

    The solution? Shut down all the servers, physically disconnect them, and haul them out of the room. Because we didn't have the authority to stop the construction, being just -- you know, students.

    So that was the day I saved the University and the State of Minnesota probably hundreds of thousands of dollars, by protecting the servers from not Elbonians, but Union workers.

  • CigarDoug (unregistered)

    Anonymizing the story to this degree is our frist line of defense against the article being the slightest bit funny.

  • Brad (unregistered) in reply to DrPepper

    Of course, the problem here is that the workers are Unionized...?

  • Paul (unregistered)

    I worked for a company that located their server room in a walk-in, first-floor cupboard. About twenty homeworkers connected to the server doing data entry. As it turns out the cupboard was directly under the building's main water tank. The rest you can fill in for yourself.

    The director of the same company once came running in with flash of inspiration: wouldn't the main editing suite - a large, open plan, sparsely populated space - look great if the main access to it from downstairs was via a shiny new spiral staircase? I had to doodle him up a diagram pointing out that this would put the bottom of the stairs in the ladies' toilets.

    The same director once decided that we absolutely had to log and monitor all internet use from the office. I investigated, installed and trained the director and an admin on this logging tool and left it running on an old PC under the stairs. 6 months later - I forget why - the director was in a flap and wanted to see the log. When I went to check the machine it was chugging away happily, monitoring traffic and not logging it. The director had turned the logging off - he didn't want his usage logged.

    Later they installed roof-high glass partitions around three sides of the development room in the office. This give you about 10-15 seconds warning if the director was coming down the corridor. A colleague of mine took to grabbing his laptop and working under his desk when this happened. The director never once asked were he'd got to.

  • Bananas (unregistered) in reply to DrPepper
    DrPepper:
    Maybe no Elbonians, but --

    I worked as a developer during my college years at the University of Minnesota (a long time ago now). One day my manager rushed into our room and grabbed me and the other two devs, and ran down the hall into the server room.

    Someone had scheduled some construction in the server room; said construction to start with a concrete saw making a large square hole in the floor. In the server room. In the server room with lots of expensive servers running. Which would have filled the room with concrete dust. Which would have ruined said servers.

    The solution? Shut down all the servers, physically disconnect them, and haul them out of the room. Because we didn't have the authority to stop the construction, being just -- you know, students.

    So that was the day I saved the University and the State of Minnesota probably hundreds of thousands of dollars, by protecting the servers from not Elbonians, but Union workers.

    I nominate this story to replace today's official and offically lame WTF.

  • Paul (unregistered) in reply to DrPepper

    Umm...

    Surely your manager was there? Was he a student? (I'm guessing not.) Did he have the authority? Did he actually ask them to stop? Did someone forget to put a 'making big hole in server room floor' in the calendar?

    Sounds like you've got half a story here: what's the other half?

    P.S. In defence of unions and union workers I'd like to cite, well... most of the 20th century. :-)

  • Tux "Tuxedo" Penguin (unregistered) in reply to ANON
    ANON:
    Which RAID-Level is required to stand a bazooka attack?

    I think only RAID-8 would do.

    Quick run down of RAID levels: RAID-0 Oh, my files are gone! RAID-1 Yes, I can! RAID-5 Those files may dive RAID-6 There's nothing you can't fix RAID-8 84Z00K4'5 1473

  • Undeclared (unregistered)

    Some time in the 1990's a former colleague went to a job interview for a C programmer position. The actual job location was somewhere in the Middle East. One of the questions asked during the interview was did he know how to handle an AK-47 and could he lead a squad of similarly armed co-workers if circumstances required it. He declined the job offer.

  • rjtlrlkj;rls erut rturut irut tg (unregistered) in reply to Pista
    Pista:
    Walky_one:
    But honestly: I'd really like to know the original version of the story...

    Yeah, me too... Not that this version is not funny, but I'd let it to Scott Adams, to make a good Sunday strip out of it.

    This version is not funny

  • (cs) in reply to neminem

    Amen to that. But at least it's not another Hanzo story. shudder

  • bb (unregistered)

    So... apart from the casual racism and sexism.. is there a WTF?

  • (cs)

    If I was expected to work in a room without air conditioning, but putting a server in that room would guarantee the addition of air conditioning in that room, I'd be taking Admin-B's position as well.

    Well, I probably just wouldn't work at that company...

  • (cs) in reply to warreng
    warreng:
    I call BS on this one. In early 2000, no IT people were looking for jobs - they were all too busy laughing from the amount of money they made out of Y2K.
    Could be a typo -- maybe he meant late 2000.
  • (cs) in reply to Roby McAndrew
    Roby McAndrew:
    There's something to be said for having your servers upstairs. A friend of mine once did disaster recovery for a firm that had a basement full of mainframes. These had the main cooling fans in the bottom, which blew air up through the racks. Unfortunately a main sewer burst, flooding the floor, and the fans continued to run for a while....
    Having the servers upstairs does not necessarily protect you from water damage.
  • anon (unregistered)

    this isnt a comment - this is a call out to battle.

    ALEX, I CHALLENGE YOU TO A ONE ON ONE CODE OFF.

    THE LANGUAGE? MUMPS.

    THE PLACE? CHILIS IN LAS VEGAS NEVADA SECOND FLOOR.

    THE PRIZE? IF YOU WIN, ILL NEVER SHITPOST ON YOUR WEBSITE AGAIN.

    THE FAILURE? IF YOU LOSE, YOU MUST MAKE ME SITE ADMIN FOR A DAY.

  • (cs) in reply to neminem
    neminem:
    Dumb. Exaggerated to the point where, while I would be curious to know what the submitted story actually looked like (if there even was one), I'm sure it had almost nothing to do with the extremely-fictional story that was posted. Anonymization is fine, writing a loosely-based-on-reality fantasy story is not so much. We came here to read WTFs in IT, not WTFs in story anonymization.

    Speak for yourself. Some of us have such tedious lives that we're happy to read anything mildly entertaining.

  • (cs) in reply to anon
    anon :
    this isnt a comment - this is a call out to battle.

    ALEX, I CHALLENGE YOU TO A ONE ON ONE CODE OFF.

    THE LANGUAGE? MUMPS.

    THE PLACE? CHILIS IN LAS VEGAS NEVADA SECOND FLOOR.

    THE PRIZE? IF YOU WIN, ILL NEVER SHITPOST ON YOUR WEBSITE AGAIN.

    THE FAILURE? IF YOU LOSE, YOU MUST MAKE ME SITE ADMIN FOR A DAY.

    That's not fair, you should offer the person you challenge the choice of weapons.

  • glapeoi r (unregistered) in reply to bb
    bb:
    So... apart from the casual racism and sexism.. is there a WTF?
    Uhm.....what? The races of the characters are made up, and the fact that a receptionist is built like a tank is hardly sexist....

    also, get a life.

  • Sole Reason for Visiting (unregistered) in reply to Severity One
    Severity One:
    The former Computing Centre of the Eindhoven University of Technology was designed to have the computers (i.e. mainframes) on the first floor (for Americans: the second floor). Because computers were large and heavy, and easily filled a room, this floor was very heavily constructed, with massive pillars to bear the load. They did the same thing for the Comp Sci department, with a state-of-the-art Georce IV ICL mainframe and bunny suits and controlled environments and what-not. Very expensive in the UK in the 1970s, considering that at the time, "air conditioning" meant "leaving the windows open, assuming you can prise the rust off the hinges."

    What they didn't think of is that computers got much smaller and lighter very rapidly, which left them with a massively over-engineered building (bit like the Forth Bridge), with the mainframes on the ground floor.

    FWIW, that happened to Aston University (Birmingham, UK), too. Used to be a College of Advanced Technology, aka a CAT, up until about 1960 or so. Turned into a University almost by accident (the political details are irrelevant). Back then, it was heavy (and I mean heavy) on mechanical engineering, which was much in demand back then. The structural engineering involved, just to construct the labs, was world-beating. Also, sadly, completely irrelevant, 20 years on. What was my point? Oh yeah. These things happen.

  • S (unregistered) in reply to neminem
    neminem:
    We came here to read WTFs in IT, not WTFs in story anonymization.

    Be honest... you don't come here to read WTFs, you come here to complain about them...

  • Reductio Ad Ridiculousum (unregistered) in reply to warreng
    warreng:
    I call BS on this one. In early 2000, no IT people were looking for jobs - they were all too busy laughing from the amount of money they made out of Y2K.
    No, they were out looking for jobs. They invested all their ill-gotten gains into dot-com.
  • Reductio Ad Ridiculousum (unregistered) in reply to Brad
    Brad:
    Of course, the problem here is that the workers are Unionized...?
    Of course! Management's not going to take the fall.
  • Bill C. (unregistered)
    snoofle:
    Everyone there, especially the women, was used to living in harsh conditions, and had grown extremely rugged as a result.
    Right or wrong, that's the kind of Amazons we dealt with in those days.

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