🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2018-02-23, Charles Richmond <nume...@aquaporin4.com> wrote:

> In a book entitled _The Devouring Fungus and Other Tales of the Computer 
> Age_, there was a story about a computer that crashed every Tuesday 
> around four o'clock.  I was found that the janitor came in at that time 
> and plugged in his electric floor buffer...  crashing the computer. 
> After things were corrected, the higher-ups were told "it was a buffer 
> problem"!!!
>
> Fast forward to a PPoE, where a computer on-site and connected to the 
> network... would crash each Thursday at two o'clock.  We got the guy at 
> the effected site to sit around on Thursday afternoon to see what 
> happened.  Sure enough, the cleaning help came in and plugged the vacuum 
> cleaner in the computer's UPS!  Problem solved.
>
> See... interest in computer humor can be helpful!  :-)

The story I like (and I read it here, haven't read the book but it
appears I should) was about the system that would go down overnight
so someone stayed around all night to watch it.  In the wee hours a
janitor would enter the room and push his cart between two rows of
disk drives; there was just enough room to do this and if the cart
wobbled it would hit the offline button on one of the drives.

The brilliance of the solution was that instead of moving the drives
a bit farther apart - which would reduce but not eliminate the problem -
they moved the drives just enough closer together that there was no
longer room for the janitor to get the cart between them at all.
That solved the problem completely and permanently.

-- 
/~\  cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ /  I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
 X   Top-posted messages will probably be ignored.  See RFC1855.
/ \  HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored.  Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!