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The small data center where this pilot fish works is a converted office in the middle of a building in New England, where cooling shouldn't be a problem in January -- right?

"One sub-zero day in January, I went into the server room to perform daily morning tasks and noticed that the temperature was about 85 degrees and rising," fish says. "Turns out the compressor on the air conditioning unit froze."

Fish opens the two doors to the room and puts a box fan in the door to blow the heat out. But with a mainframe and a few racks of servers, the temperature keeps climbing.

Great, fish thinks, it's 20 below outside and all our systems are going to shut down because they're overheating. And because the server room is in the middle of the building, he can't just open a window.

That's when it hits him that the company he works for is a wholesale distributor of plumbing and heating supplies. He runs down to the warehouse and gets a length of flexible duct, and then runs if from an open outside window all the way to the computer room.

"It ended about three feet short of the door, but by turning the box fan around to blow cold air in, we were able to get the room down to 65 degrees in about an hour," says fish. "Negative-20-degree air will do that.

"The people who sat near the open window weren't too happy about it until we covered the open area with the box the flexible duct came in."

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