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Admin
First and hottest!
Admin
Wow. About the first story on here where I really have thought "WTF!"...
Really shows the benefit of a fresh set of eyes and the stupidity of people who live with an issue because "that's the way it's always been."
Admin
Well it's quite possible that people were hired after the problem came up and people who used to work there before the problem occurred are gone. So as far as they are concerned, it literally always has been that way.
Admin
I'm ashamed to say I had something similar happen at home. The microwave stopped working one day and we went without for a month or two. Until one day someone noticed something in the breaker box...
Admin
And how much equipment failed due to the sudden change in ambient temperature?
Admin
Facilities Maintenance West, It East. Never the two shall meet.
captcha: feugiat
Admin
Now that's a decent WTF!
I did a similar thing at home. The sparky-clicky thing that lights the gas hobs had been broken for like 2 years. I was considering replacing the oven, but we were getting along fine with a cigarette lighter to light them so I didn't, although we did go looking for a new one a couple of times.
One day something fell behind the oven so I pulled it out to get it. That's when I noticed the old, rusty AA battery installed at the back of the oven. Replacing that miraculously bought my sparky-clicker back to life.
Not once in 2 years did it occur to me that there must be some sort of power source... and yes, that makes a moron of the highest order.
At least I didn't buy a new oven...
Admin
Capchta: eros. Now I know why I was feeling randy.
Admin
At before mentioned 'previous job', we had a 'hot server room'... It was the main data center and it was hot cause there were more servers in there than the 5ton AC unit could handle. It was constantly 90F+ in there. The portable units did nothing. Eventually, when we had legacy systems failing with the message 'Unable to access drive: heat failure detected' (Don't remember the exact message, but this is pretty close), plans were finally put into motion to get a 30ton AC unit going for the center.
Everything went pretty well, until we found out whoever installed the backup power for the data center did not properly ground it...
Admin
This sort of left-hand right-hand stuff happens in any sufficiently large bureaucracy. It still makes me sad every time.
Admin
Same thing happened to me with a house I was renting. I had just moved in and went a couple days without a fridge. Everything in the house worked except for the fridge. Even the little hand-held ---> Battery <--- vacuum cleaner that was plugged into the same set of outlets as the fridge.
So here I am, wondering why the vacuum cleaner works when plugged into the same outlet the fridge is plugged in and the fridge doesn't. Swap plugs, fridge still doesn't work and vacuum cleaner works. Ok, something has gotta be wrong with the fridge.
It didn't dawn on me right away that the vacuum cleaner had a battery and wasn't running on A/C power. Eventually I just went to the breaker box and yep, that one outlet in the whole kitchen had it's own breaker which was off!
Funny how well the fridge started working after I turned the breaker on...
Admin
Summary:
Just when you think you've tried and thought of everything under the sun, the super flips the light switch from its cozy "OFF" position to "ON", thus correcting an overheating issue that has plagued the coat room for 5+ years.
Admin
Of course it had it's own outlet - that is what the electrical code specifies!
Admin
Exactly my point. Dumb new people accepted it as the way it had always been. The smart new guy was willing to try every avenue possible to get it fixed... he wasn't willing to accept it
Admin
Code and reality don't always mix
Admin
Admin
Plus not all of us happen to have electrical code memorized. =)
Admin
Admin
Unfortunately I can't understand the measures specified, are the rooms small or big? Is 98F too cold or too hot?
Admin
I just can't buy this. No one noticed that there was no air coming out of the vent? No one noticed that one day it was much, much hotter? The first thing people do when a room is too hot, whether it's full of hardware or not, is complain to maintenance.
Admin
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=98+degrees+f+in+c 98 degrees Fahrenheit = 36.6666667 degrees Celsius 65 degrees Fahrenheit = 18.3333333 degrees Celsius
Admin
My first motorbike (very cheap 125) died on me one day, as if it had run out of petrol (though there was plenty in the tank). The problem kept reccuring so enventually I took out the engine, stripped it down, could see nothing wrong so put it back together. Next week the same thing happend but when I opened the petrol cap I heard the pop of a vacuum being released. Closer inspection showed that the pinhole which stopped a vacuum from forming as the tank emptied had become blocked by a tiny speck of dirt.
Hey, at least I learned how to use a torque wrench!
Admin
Anyone notice the TeamCity ad? I finally realized it's a bunch of soccer players defending against a penalty kick, but at first blush it looks nothing so much as a team of guys, desperate for you to commit your code so they can go to the bathroom.
WTF Advertising for the kicker.
Admin
Turn the AC back on. Well, it's hardly a very memorable end to the story (I would have preferred some explosions and at least a little bit of carnage) but this is a WTF if ever I saw one. A server room without active cooling is an accident waiting to happen. When the cooling is there but not on, that's surely a firing waiting to happen.
Admin
Although, it may just be that I live and work in a different country than you!
Admin
I was thinking exactly the same thing. We put up with the monthly "Thanks to our sponsors" articles and I thought that was based on the higher class of advertisers that Alex managed to find. But the TeamCity add is right down there with Pokemon cursors (especially in terms of effectiveness).
Admin
In my old days as IT Guy I coined the motto "always check the cables first" for this very reason. I recall countless occasions where I "saved the day" fixing something seconds after showing up because of that:
A telecommunication container installed by our friendly phone company setup to provide an E1 voice and data link through microwave to our remote construction site (a copper mine project somewhere in the North of Chile). After the engineer expending countless hours figuring out why the modem wasn't picking up the data link I told him to check the cables one more time. He was using a long (several meters) cat-5 cable with only 2 pairs wired to the plugs. I grabbed one of the standard cat-5 built by myself for the office network (w/all 4 pairs wired) and we got link.
One day I get the call from the other construction site 100km away, their data link went down. It was a weekend and only one IT guy was up there. We walked through typical trobleshooting:
Cables: check
Data link: Check
Called EDS to check router configs: check
Another hour and almost giving up to the fact of having to drive up there in the middle of the night I go back to "check the cables" and ask him to unplug the cable between the Cisco router and network and read me the color order in the plugs... whatever color order he reads is not the standard so I ask:
Me: where the heck did you get that cable? He: is the cable that came with the Cisco router Me: you mean that flat gray cable you use to connect to the Cisco Console? He: Yes Me: And that is the one you are using to connect it to the switch? He: Yes Me: Ok (after muttering some cursewords) just grab any free patch cable from the rack and use it instead. He: Ok
... turned he was bored and decided to organize the wires around the racks when he saw the Cisco router was not connected to the network using the "cisco-provided cable"
Admin
[quote user="Kermos"][quote user="DOA"]I'm ashamed to say I [...]
It didn't dawn on me right away that the vacuum cleaner had a battery and wasn't running on A/C power. Eventually I just went to the breaker box and yep, that one outlet in the whole kitchen had it's own breaker which was off!
Funny how well the fridge started working after I turned the breaker on...[/quote]
Standard wiring config - idea being that this way if something trips in the kitchen (like a knife in the toaster), your food won't spoil.
Admin
Reminds me of this story: http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2000/02/backtalk.html
Five monkeys were in a room that contained a table in one corner, and a banana hanging from a string in the middle of the room. The monkeys figured out that if they dragged the table to the middle of the room, they could climb up and grab the banana. So they did. As one of the monkeys quickly hopped up and reached for the banana, hidden compartments in the walls suddenly opened, releasing high-pressure cold water that knocked the monkey off the table and drenched the other four monkeys. The rest is here
http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2000/02/backtalk.html
Admin
That in itself is stupid. If the components are that critical, there should be a backup. Equipment in "cold" server rooms dies too.
Admin
The dialogue in these stories is so unrealistic. Every single sentence is cutoff by the other person interrupting mid-word! Nobody talks like this in real life, especially at work.
Well, except for the really annoying indian guy I worked with at my last job who would pick his nose in meetings and was a complete goddam idiot who smelled like he never bathed.
But anyway, human beings don't really talk this way, and it's incredibly distracting while trying to read. Why aren't the WTFs written in the same style as the sidebar -- just a description of the actual event, not glammed up with all the extraneous information and dialogue.
Admin
Is it EVE Online?
Admin
Haven't you kind of talked yourself out of your own argument here?
Admin
Admin
Admin
Except builders (at least in Ottawa) get away with not complying with this piece of electrical code.
It's a bit obsolete - new fridges barely touch the amount of power available in a breaker (they use about 120 watts of the whole 1800 watts). Sure bigger ones use a little more, and there's a surge when it starts, but still..
Admin
It's a great story, but just that, a story. Monkeys really don't have foresight of cause and effect like that. They might panic and cower in a corner when they see the banana being touched, just before the water comes out, but they won't equate assaulting the new monkey as a way to stop the water. Stupid monkeys.
Admin
You know, any of those components could still fail for any number of reasons. It's always best to have some actual redundancy built in to the architecture, such as a hot standby of the most critical core components and designing your software to fall back on less efficient methods of doing the same thing, so you don't have an overly complex system that could break at any point from the smallest software/hardware glitch.
All in the interest of avoiding a business catastrophe... you know?
Admin
I think it depends on a number of factors including the people involved and the availability of a dedicated maintenance department/person.
A similar thing happened at an organization for which I worked once upon a time. To give you some background, the turn-over rate at the company rivaled that of the local McBurger Joint, and a couple weeks prior to the heat wave in the sole server closet, the entire network engineer/system admin segment of the IT group were fresh from the unemployment line.
One of the new faces, Jim the jack-of-all-trades, took charge of the situation immediately. The first things he did were to shut down all of the non-critical systems, prop open the server closet door, and ordered a set of portable AC units from Rent-an-AC.
Fifteen minutes later, I approached the server closet to see if I could possibly get my dev server switched back on since the portable AC units were on the way. Interestingly enough, when I arrived, the server closet door was shut. I asked Jim about it, and he blushingly relayed to me that the reason that it seemed like the AC had failed was because a loose ceiling tile near the wall had fallen and wedged itself between the climate control vent and the server rack.
Admin
I think we missed the last part of the story - when the power for all that equipment trips because the AC unit got turned back on ;)
Admin
Ted just screwed himself for the rest of his career there. He will forever be known as the guy who can magically fix a $178,000 problem for free. Hope he has a magic wand.
Admin
/sigh The real WTF (tm) is that they went through all that rigaramarole to ferret out solutions to the 'hot room' problem, but skipped the basic check that takes 10 minutes - check the breakers.
Admin
Admin
Hey, I had a guy just like that - the smell of him in the same office made me literally gag. Thankfully, he got married and stopped stinking (this was a year or so ago), but he's still an annoying asshole that interrupts all the time.
Power cable is cheap, as is another breker; this is insurance against spoiled food.
Admin
Not to be a bother, but you can block PK's, you can however block direct and indirect free-kicks.
Admin
On a similar note, I worked at a software startup, where we had one floor of an office building. We had packed in people using folding tables, people in corridors etc. plus most people had more than one computer - devs with two or three workstations, QA people with a couple of PCs plus a PowerPC Mac and a Intel Mac. Small server closet with portable units pushing air into the false ceiling.
Anyhow in the summer months it was sweltering, we all wore shorts and got free ice cream, but it was still unpleasant. We finally moved out, and as part of the move had contractors in to remove circuits from the server closet and clean up other wiring stuff - they notices our thermostats went to the A/C for the floor above and vice versa. The floor above had been unoccupied the whole time so the A/C had never been doing anything much...
Admin
Admin
While we're sharing A/C stories, I once worked in a place that had been designed to be open-plan, but instead walls were put up for offices. Mine was one of 3 on the same thermostat. My office was always absolutely freezing - to the point where I had a hot water bottle in my drawer, and used it regularly. The (smaller) office in the middle was always just right, and the large 3-person office on the other end was as warm as mine was cold. I believe that several looked at it and nothing could be done, and as I as I know it's still like that.
Admin
Hmmm, the sparky clicky thing on my oven runs on wall power, ditto for my stove and water heater, and the one on my BBQ has no electrical power source. I would never have imagined a wall oven having battery powered components.
Separately, I have a power outlet in my yard, enclosed in a "sealed" box. Unbeknownst to me, the gasket failed, the outlet rusted and shorted out. I knew to check the breakers. No breakers were off. WTF?
An electrician showed me a shortcut to finding the problem: all outlets near water (kitchen, bath, outside) must be on a GFIC circuit.
Sort of.
It turns out that they can also be daisy chained off an unrelated GFI circuit. We walked through the house checking each GFI outlet until we found one that was dead - in the upstairs bathroom on the other side of the house. After the outside outlet was replaced, we just reset the upstairs GFI outlet and everything was fine.
Sometimes you just don't know what to look for beyond the basics - it depends upon your background.
Admin
My, aren't WE feeling metric today.