Where's the fire?

Pilot fish discovers that the fire alarm in this university data center doesn't actually alert the fire department -- and it's during a small crisis, but fortunately not a fire. He notifies the proper people, but was the problem resolved? "Flash forward about three months," says fish. "A high school group was touring the facility, and on the way out, they were told to push the red button on the wall, which keeps the door open without setting off an alarm. One Chinese exchange student confused "push" with "pull." I came back from lunch to four fire trucks, three police cars, the student media center van and one very, very frightened exchange student who was scared to death that she was about to go to jail, regardless of how many of our administrators kept telling her it was an accident. I saw my boss on the way in and said, 'I guess they really did fix that alarm, didn't they?'"

Aha!
Boss asks pilot fish to take a user's PC back to the workshop because the PC is overheating and rebooting randomly. "I run a diagnostic test but can't find the problem," says fish. "So I load the PC into my car to take it to the workshop." Halfway there, his cell phone rings. It's the user, who's back from lunch and is complaining that not only hasn't fish fixed the problem she reported, but now the screen is blank and her keyboard doesn't respond. Didn't you notice that the big beige box is missing? fish asks. User: "Oh, is that part of my computer?"

How Not to Save Money
It's 1991, and this small Danish company uses Unix workstations for its software development. When it's upgrade time, the sysadmin backs up each workstation's data on a single tape drive. "The upgrade went fine, so the sysadmin made ready to reinstall user data," reports a pilot fish on the scene. "This time, he placed the tape drive close to his own workstation. He didn't have an outlet nearby, so he strung two extension cords together. He powered up the tape drive -- and when he flicked the power switch, the tape drive went poof. Turns out his extension cords were homemade, and in one of them, phase and neutral were exchanged. This is not usually a problem -- but when you connect it to another extension cord where neutral and ground are exchanged, all of a sudden, you get 220 volts on the chassis ground. It took four days to get a new tape drive, and the workstation users were more or less reduced to using pencil and paper."

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