A toast to being in the right place at the right time Once again, dear reader, it is Monday, and we brace for the start of a new working week. To ease the pain, The Reg brings you Who, Me? in which readers tell their tales of derring-do – or at least derring-try. This week meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Nellie", who long ago worked for a Primary Care Trust – part of the UK's …
Went to a larger company to do some training and we ate in the staff canteen. There was some reasonable food on offer and my host bought me lunch. He had to as the system was cashless and deducted from your pay at the end of the month. Whilst eating a smell appeared which was so bad I became concerned about their drains. My host said we could move to different table and then explained it was a fish curry another member of staff brings in and warms up in the microwave. I said they were sitting on a goldmine as they could market that scent for use in riot control to disperse people, empty buildings etc. That earned me a big laugh,
I said they were sitting on a goldmine as they could market that scent for use in riot control to disperse people, empty buildings etc.
All it takes to empty an London Underground tube train during a hot summer is one single durian. Got in near the front of the tube at Picadilly and by the time we reached Hammersmith there was no longer a soul on the train as all the windows between carriages were open. And yes, I have done that. Not by design, but I realised when we got to Hammersmith what was going on as people who stepped in immediately bailed again :).
I myself didn't care - years of chemical industry and bad weekends have enabled me to ignore quite a few smells :).
"My host said we could move to different table and then explained it was a fish curry another member of staff brings in and warms up in the microwave."
That's why having a ban on brining super pungent foods should be in place. The same goes for powerful perfume and cologne. While we humans don't have the best olfactory senses in the animal kingdom, we can smell well enough that microwaved fish curry should be a flogging offense.
"At a previous gig, we had a manager with no sense of smell - complete anosmia. He also liked fish. He was the only one who couldn't smell it."
A large part of enjoying food is the smell as well as the taste. If he had no sense of smell, I'd imagine his sense of taste was hampered I'd guess that this in turn would make him need and/or want quite different, possibly stronger flavours than most of might enjoy to get the most out of it. Unless he was one of those people that see food simply as food, a necessary evil.
"Now imagine what we did to the guy who tried microwaving kippers at our place!"
So you've met Vince of the 'Vince is not allowed to cook kippers in the microwave' sign (and the refusal of the mechanics to work on his van because of his habit of buying prawns then leaving the half eaten remains under the seat)
That was the big problem in our office. The break room was at one end of a large building. Every time someone made popcorn, Facilities would get a dozen calls about smoke... attributed to all kinds of random electrical panels, air conditioners, elevators, forklifts, recently arrived pallets of merchandise, or section of conveyor in the warehouse. IT got pulled in less often, but there were always a few people convinced their computers were smoking. Even those who knew somebody burned popcorn would be adamant that they were reporting an entirely different burning smell...
similar problem; My first IT job was for a local bank that had their drive-up banking in a smaller building on the same lot as the main building for the branch, and it was connected with a large vaccum tube transport system. Some chucklehead burned a bag of microwave popcorn in the drive up building, and what small amount of smell got into the tube container proceeded to linger all over the main area of the branch building. Microwaving popcorn out there was rather quickly banned.
"Even those who knew somebody burned popcorn would be adamant that they were reporting an entirely different burning smell..."
By the time the smell wafts from one end of the building to the other, it picks up other smells and can sometimes enhance those where you wouldn't have noticed them much all by themselves. The sense of smell just like vision is far more complicated than most of us realize and utterly fascinating.
Badly burnt toast is a stink that lingers for DAYS!
Try cremating a ribeye. After a night shift I wanted to fry one, but underestimated just how tired I was so I woke up in a kitchen with a lot of smoke (this was before smoke detectors were a thing), well cremated remnants of a ribeye and an unbelievable stench that took months to vanish..
"I once(*) forgot I was making chicken stock(**) with the carcass and the stock pot ran dry. The smell of burnt chicken skin and bones is … not pleasant."
I did that once too. I must have caught it sooner than you did though. At most, it smelled if fried chicken and the smell was gone by morning :-)
AFAIK, the current law in Scotland is to have heat detectors in kitchen areas, and not smoke detectors. Avoids false alarms that desensitise people to them: alarm goes off and everyone stays put assuming it's just somebody burning the toast again! Eventually, they'll realise it's for real when the corridors fill with smoke. That's also the time when they realise that learning where the nearest fire exit is, rather than going out by the main way, might have been a good idea. I say that after many fire drills where the fire exits were often unused - that is, until we blocked off the usual corridors and made everyone find an alternative route.
Actually, this reminds me of the time I was running a management system audit on a company. On arrival, I was shown to the conference room on the first floor (per UK definitions - one flight up from ground level). Just after the opening meeting was started, the fire alarm sounded. The H&S Manager offered to escort me to the assembly point and accompanied me past the fire exit opposite the conference room door, and into the queue of staff going down the main stairs and out via reception. Having noted where the exit was, and not sensing any smoke or heat (and immediate danger) I complied. It wasn't a big office and my assessment of the situation was that it was probably a false alarm (as most tend to be), not a high-risk office and refusing my escort and taking the fire exit might have led to panic (as it was, everyone was leaving in an orderly manner. Notwithstanding, I raised the issue when the audit meeting restarted and raised a requirement for staff evacuation retraining. I also commented on the location of the fire assembly point: the entrance to the car park and access to the building; had the emergency services responded, access to the building would have been blocked by all the staff.
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Did you also observe the re-entry process?
Years ago I was at a meeting in a central-London building with highly secured entry, turnstiles & metal detectors etc. After an evacuation due to a kitchen smoke incident we hung around outside for 30 minutes or so, and then re-entered the building - via the fire doors helpfully held open by the fire wardens, without even a basic badge check. Anyone could have triggered the alarm from the lobby, and then joined the crowd at the assembly point to get in.
I worked in telecoms back in the early 2000 and visited telehouse in London several times. For the client entrance it was all shiny badge locks, rotating pods etc. so you could not sneak in. The loading dock on the other hand was the usual state with doors wedged open and the delivery driver was able to help us move the rack cabinet most of the way to the final location without and checks from security.
A few times we had a fire drill while the regional facilities manager was on site. She made extra sure everyone used their swipe card to get back into the building. They could show their ID cards if they didn't have one. Assuming they hadn't put them in their wallet and left it upstairs...
"Years ago I was at a meeting in a central-London building with highly secured entry, turnstiles & metal detectors etc. After an evacuation due to a kitchen smoke incident we hung around outside for 30 minutes or so, and then re-entered the building - via the fire doors helpfully held open by the fire wardens, without even a basic badge check. Anyone could have triggered the alarm from the lobby, and then joined the crowd at the assembly point to get in."
One place I had the displeasure to work at, this could never have happened.
The fire alarm system was crap and often false triggered.
The first time I heard it, I was heading to the exit and everyone stared at me, like WTF ? No-one else moved ...
This was in a country where indeed any fire in a building meant loss of lives ...
One place I worked was threatened with fines by the fire service, because staff congregated in the main road entrance like that (one floor had both it's trained fire wardens off on holiday somehow, and no-one told people where to go).
Threats to the bank account pushed building management to make sure fire wardens were trained in sufficient numbers in future.
I was visiting our office a few years ago to do some stuff in the workshop (a fortunately infrequent occurrence!). Fire alarm went off and everyone dutifully headed across to the far side of the workshop, down the corridor and out the main door. I went out the fire door right by me, and the closest exit for ALL of the workshop guys. So I wandered around to the front of the building to the assembly point and beat my collogues there. It was, of course, a false alarm and an email came around from a manager asking who had left the workshop fire door open and could it please not happen again. I replied to the email, copying in the fire marshals and H&S people in, that I had left that way as per written policy. H&S replied stating that I was correct and the relevant Fire Marshal agreed and apologised for not checking the fire door once the all clear had been approved. Eventually, said manager also agreed I'd done the right thing and pointed out to the rest of the workshop staff that they should also have gone out that way. So, a win win all around apart from the workshop staff feeling I'd dropped them in it for a while after :-)
So, as per quite a few of the replies here, most fore alarms are either drills or false alarms and most people, from habit, exit the building via their normal entrance and rarely use the proper fire routes until someone puts their head above the parapet and point out the flaws.
I was visiting our office a few years ago to do some stuff in the workshop
When I was young and stupid I was in the Army Reserve and was visiting Sydney's Victoria Barracks to get a pay issue sorted. Fire alarm goes off for an unannounced drill, and to make the drill more realistic smoke grenades were let off to mimic the lack of visibility if there was a real fire.
They discovered the hard way that things were placed where they shouldn't be, doors were blocked, walkways that should have remined clear weren't etc. I believe the final tally was a broken leg, a broken ankle , a broken elbow, and many many many grazes and bruises from falls and colliding with furniture.
Edict came out - never ever do that again !
Sounds like a really effective test to me - you just pointed out the problems they'd have if it was a real evacuation (a few broken bones and lots of bruises), and the root causes (and therefore solutions) to the problems. I bet if they ran the same drill a month later, it would go perfectly!
Similar problem in CMK, except it was the Bar/Restaurant on the ground floor that did this 3 times over a space of about 4 months. (It's just a good job that they didn't flambé anything!)
Cue, the whole building evacuation, but at least our evacuation point was under one of the underpasses and so we were out of the rain.
The whole fire alarm system for the Bar was redone from scratch to avoid this issue in the future.
Icon: just too obvious!
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Lister: Look, I don't want any toast, and he doesn't want any toast. In fact, no-one around 'ere wants any toast!
Talkie Toaster: How 'bout a muffin?
Lister: Or muffins, we don't like muffins round 'ere! We don't want muffins, no toast, buns, baps, bagets or bagels, no croissants, no crumpets, no teacakes, no potato cakes and no hot cross buns! And definitely no smegging flapjacks!
Talkie Toaster (after a very brief pause): Ah, so you're a waffle man!
Since not sure if links to BBC youtube will work in the benighted lands beyond the western ocean
> not sure if links to BBC youtube will work in the benighted lands beyond the western ocean...
Our eastern ocean? Yes, the direct link before yours worked fine in Maine USA.
I have been refused before, but moreso on the BBC's own servers than on YouTube.
Lately, on BBC site, I don't even have to play the game of "I am under 13(?) years age" to bypass verification, the top-right "X" drops the challenge.
If you start excluding all thevwriters and artists with dodgy personal lives, the list is long. Oscar Wilde (paedophile sex tourist), Eric Gill (child abuser) and many others its a longlist.
I know people who knew Clarke and as far as anyone sayss his tastes ran to young men but of an age that would be legal in most western countires. Technicaly illegal where he lived due to rarely (never?) enforced sodpmy laws.
Over the past couple of weeks, I feel that the headlines and subheads for both the Who Me? and On-Call columns have become more or less full spoilers for the stories themselves. The combination of the words "toast", "mysterious network dropouts" and "popped up" doesn't leave much to the imagination.
I get that that's how headlines work for "normal" articles, but these stories should contain at least an element of surprise - otherwise, why would they end up in these columns at all? Please - take us along for the ride; don't just put us on the sidelines, laughing and pointing fingers. Please?
Something like "Mary Pops-in, the network drops out and the culprit pops up?" (With apologies to P L Travers.)
With Nellie reganonymized (regomized) as Mary instead.
Also wondering how to get a soft 'g' for regomized etc with English orthography - regiomized/regianonymized? Wm Cobbett who also published a (Political) Register would have had an opinion (didn't he always) and was the author of at least one English grammar text.
And funnily enough, just as I was reading the article (during my lunch break I'll hasten to add) I get a text from gov.uk informing me that there's still network issues at "a major government defence site" near Bristol due to a power outage in the area earlier. Well I guess it shows that the system works - even though I don't actually work there.
But rather amusingly it announces that there are still connectivity problems on some floors - check the intranet for details. I always find this sort of thing amusing - if you have no network, check the [inter|intra]net for details, as if you need details if you have a working network or be able to enquire if you don't.
I was on a customer site when the fire alarm went off and they evacuated our building. There was a builder's shed in the car park which was in flames so it was a real fire. I believe there were gas cylinders in the shed - so potentially very dangerous. There were several buildings linked by corridors - and in order to get from building 1 to building 3 you had to go through our building. Despite fire wardens trying to stop people going into building 2 - people pushed their way past.
The fire brigade head officer happened to be in building 2 and asked why people were transiting through building 2.
Apparently the fire officers report was interesting reading. I heard there was an action plan along the lines of education ... "If the fire alarm is ringing. Leave the building. Do not go into the affected building to collect your keys, or to transit the building, or to go an collect your coat, or a cup of coffee... If someone is injured or killed as a result of your stupidity, you will be liable."
I remember very early in my career working on a site that had lots of different stuff going on. So there were multiple types of alarm depending on what flavour of s*** had hit which fan that day and how hard.
One alarm meant leave the building, another meant don't stay outside and get in the nearest building, unless that nearest building was sounding the "stay out" alarm at the same time. That sort of thing.
At our site induction, lots of young eager scientists (including me) kept bombarding the presenter trying to figure out all the possible permutations and what we should do in any circumstance. We even got to asking what to do if two buildings were emitting the "get in nearest building" alarm, but you were equidistant between them, or if going to the nearest safe building meant going past the "keep away" building on the way.
After a few moments, the presenter, quite rightly, stopped the conversation and said "I thought you lot were meant to be clever, just use your common sense!".
I once worked at a government facility with an abundance of spicy rocks
The criticality alarm was a howling banshee and the official procedure was to remain in your office with the windows closed and await further instructions.
The democratically-decided-on policy among the engineers was to get in the nearest car, drive as fast as possible for the nearest fence and not stop until you were in another county
I worked in a building with walls which were almost entirely glass. Another company's call centre in the building would occasionally get bomb threats (I doubt any caller even knew where the call centre was to the nearest hundred miles). Our exit was at the back of the building and the assembly point was on the grass at the front next to the ring road necessitating walking round the end of the building, and quite close to it. I made clear to facilities that in the event of a bomb scare, no matter how un-scary, my route away from the building would be as straight and perpendicular to it as possible and my destination as far away as possible in that direction. I had seen bombed buildings - including a former place of work.
My experience of research scientists (and of, once, many years ago, being one) is that common sense can be conspicuously absent amongst the supposedly very clever. In totally unrelated news, I decided to stop being a research scientist before I managed to poison myself badly.
To which the answer is "if common sense was good enough, we'd not need the training".
The whole point of carefully set up emergency protocols is that common sense (without knowledge of the special circumstances) may mislead you into doing something dangerous - aka "shut all this off now, just shut it off!". (Twinkie)
I was told off for binging my mug of tea with me in a (test) fire evacuation. I'd just stepped out of the kitchen after making it when the alarm went off, so I determined that the safest action was not to turn around and go back into the kitchen to put it down, but to continue to the fire exit.
I was also told off for not using the fire exit next to my office - which would have entailed walking from the kitchen 150yards through the building to the other end to get to said exit, instead of simply immediately exiting down the stairs at the kitchen end.
"having witnessed an operator fault no diagnostic software could ever have detected"
Diagnostics might not have been able to establish *why* the terminator was being power-cycled during working hours, but the way the story was written makes it sound like they weren't even aware it was being power-cycled *at all*, which suggests the terminator might not have been logging as much information as it ought to have been...
I've watched my son do it... he was three years old at the time though.
Shut down the whole tech for a church service, which I was running at the time. Took me very little time to diagnose the source of the failure, when I looked over he still had his hand on the switch (yes technically he'd hit the switch not pulled the plug, but same overall effect).
I'm not sure if that is worse than randomly plugging things back in. One evening my dad absent mindedly plugged in the random plug sitting on the kitchen counter. The next morning the whole downstairs stinks of burnt cheese. He'd plugged the sandwich toaster in!
The plug was promptly marked with a red X.
While still extremely hung over (But had least had the benefit of lunch), returning to fix things in hotel room at a trade show, I picked up my soldering iron on the wrong end.
In my defence I had actually unplugged it before lunch (So the chambermaid could work) & wasn't expecting it to be hot, it was the hotel chambermaid that plugged it back in instead of the mini-bar after she had finished hoovering.
Took a few seconds longer to register the pain than normal, I had to pull the iron from my flesh (It sticks) & burning human flesh really does smell like pork.
Because it is the break room with a little kitchen !
On the other end you expect: Coffee machine, mixer, waffle maker, microwave, hot plate, fridge, ice machine, knife sharpener, kettle heater, the Spanish inquisition, egg cooker and so on. But not vital network equipment.
Had a customer that reported an outage late on Friday as everyone was leaving for the weekend. Sent network expert out on Monday and found no issues. Everything was fine. Issue repeated again and again, but outage was only on a Friday afternoon. Repeated calls and on-site inspection showed no cause. If I mention that this was back in the NetWare / Thin Ethernet days, some of you will immediately know the cause :) Tech was sent out on a Friday afternoon with a primitive network analyzer to babysit. Down the network went. A little searching and it was discovered that a user was taking his laptop home for the weekend and disconnecting the cables at the "T" connector. Thus: Down Goes the Network.
Doctors surgery had network issues every morning & worse on Mondays (Last day of work at this company & sent to invesitgate the client site).
Asked to see the router & switch & its on full display top shelf in cabinent of medical consumables (Swabs, bandages etc), asked a question & the diagnosis was completed .5ms later.
"Do you close this cabinent up at night?"
Yes....Why?
Colleague and I were staying at a pub for work once. After a long tiring day in the field we got back to the pub and the friendly landlord asked us if we could look at his broadband connection and see what was wrong with it. We said yes as he was a nice chap despite us wanting only to grab a shower and dinner. It shows how tired we were when after 45 mins of head scratching, pinging, DNS changing etc. we only then noticed he had no ADSL filter plugged in.
Two lessons learnt: 1 check the obvious first and 2 always keep the pub landlord sweet (we drank for free that night as his way of saying thanks, so 45mins well spent).
Dad used to work away a lot. One time when he was home, he'd cadged a drum of 75Ohm Co-Ax and left it in the garage. A nice cream coloured one he planned to save for when the TV aerial cable needed changed. Anyway, he gets home after 6 months somewhere hot helping build NATO radar systems around the edges of the USSR and mum happens to mention that the drum of "washing line" he'd left wasn't very good, it kept snapping and it was all used up now. See icon ------------->
No need to re-cable for that. I used to run an engineering department (almost 30 years ago now!) and every lunchtime we ran doom, quake and hexan. Every machine had a boot menu which gave the choice of work or play. The play menu simply loaded up IPX drivers, then presented a list of available games. As an exercise in team building it was tremendous, and all the stresses of the day were relieved by the end of lunchtime.
Good times.
I once inherited a site with Netware & ThinNet. At some point there had been a problem, or stuff had been moved, but either way there was a cable that went diagonally across the floor of the manager's office - with the tube of a chair (those old metal ones where a tube was bent to form the frame in one piece) sat on top of it. Sometimes the network went down when the manager had a visitor.
Years ago, working in a computing lab, a student came up to our support counter complaining the stuff he'd sent to the printer hadn't. Although I didn't work there, I happened to be at the counter and the printer was on the way back to my office, so I went with the student to have a look. When I got to the printer, it was dead. No lights, no sound, nothing.
Fearing something bad had happened, I found the power cable, tracing it back to where it *should* have been plugged into the wall. Wanting to charge his laptop, the student had ignored the two empty double sockets where he was sitting (he was sitting near the printer), unplugged the printer and plugged his laptop in.
I plugged the printer in, and after several minutes of warming up, the printer printed multiple copies of everything he'd printed. Yes, he had hit "print" several times when nothing happened, but by the time the printer had warmed up, they'd all been sent to the printer and removed from the queue.
Or back in the days of Sun, DisplayPostscript(tm) and every manufacturer having their own good ideas.
prof: I sent a paper to the printer and it crashed the printer.
me mere student: have you tried turning it ...
prof: yes I tried sending it to every other printer in the dept and it did the same thing
Naturally this was after 5:00pm on a friday afternoon and we didn't have anything like 24/7 support. We had the full, paper form to IT, have request lost, queried,lost,recycled as firelighters etc etc support
I recall taking a call from a manager one day - my terminal* isn't working. Went down to her office and found no ethernet cable in the back of her PC - she'd lent her connection to a visitor to plug his laptop in. At least she did realise, with some embarrassment, what the problem was after I pointed it out - unlike some who would question why it didn't still work.
* This being a terminal emulator on a desktop PC running a Telnet session to a Unix system - that should date it.
At one place I worked we had that. vistor came in, unplugged somebody's network cable, plugged his laptop in.
* Why can't I get a connection?
# In the popup your have to enter your payroll number and password to verify your work here, after your machine ID has been verified that verifies the laptop is one of our computers.
Some people really do think that networks points are just like power sockets.
"Fearing something bad had happened, I found the power cable, tracing it back to where it *should* have been plugged into the wall. Wanting to charge his laptop, the student had ignored the two empty double sockets where he was sitting (he was sitting near the printer), unplugged the printer and plugged his laptop in."
Well, of COURSE he pulled the printer plug and used that socket. How else could he be absolutely certain he was choosing a working socket? Those empty ones were probably empty for a reason, ie they don't work. If they did work, there'd be something plugged in to them. Sheesh, some people! :-)
Over here, the relay in an old fridge sends a massive spike back through the mains and the unfiltered 2.1 subwoofer sends it straight to the 4" speaker. It sounds like a 9mm bullet that was hit by lightning, the best approximation.
The kicker is, it goes through USB earphones as well. A loud, sharp CRACK ringing through, every time. The affected machine has an UPS, but since the 2.1 spike comes through the sound port, it does not block the signal.
It took a while to figure it was a fridge, now I miss a way to filter it away.
Two ways: Current limiter on fridge or replace the fridge. I'd recommend replace, that thing must be VERY inefficient if it can send such spikes. Measure it, there are several ways to catch how much it eats, like an oscilloscope with a high amp shunt and then trigger on it...
I'd suggest a snubber on the relay, but what do I know.
You can also buy external snubbers.
The fridge compressor motor is an inductive load, and the inrush current is large, which is why fridges need high-value current limiters (aka 'fuses'), because they blow low ones. If you artificially restrict the inrush current, you risk the compressor motor stalling, which would be a bad thing.
When the relay switches to apply power, the motor's resistance is effectively zero (hence the large inrush current). When the relay switches to remove power on a running motor, you generate a large voltage which can produce a spark (and nasty emi) across the relay. You usually put an RC snubber in place to control this. I'd expect the fridge to have one, but it is possible any capacitors in it have 'gone bad' - so the fridge either needs repairing or replacing, or an external workaround to suppress the emi.
NN
I worked for a stockbrokers, and because the cleaners never cleaned under the desks, we tried to avoid having the Pcs on the floor. this would then result in having powerboards on desks.
Whenever we specced new desks up, they had 2 RJ45 sockets and 4 power points for each desk. Then we would get the users that pushed their keyboard up to the PC case and were constantly hitting the power button ;)
I started thinking I knew what was up when the description said the server rack was under the counter. My next surmise is usually that somebody, out of an overabundance of caution, turned the switch off for an outlet as can happen in the UK. A distant third would have been something else on the circuit drawing enough current to drop the voltage to the point where some bit of hardware drops out and then resets when the line voltage is back up.
I think we all know here that a server rack of any sort needs to have a dedicated circuit that can't be switched off accidentally. "Hey, what does this switch do?" That might mean locating it someplace where running a new circuit is easiest if money is tight, but it's better all around to just budget for the expense and do it right the first time.
There are plenty of stories of building cleaners unplugging things to use an outlet or plugging a heavy duty floor scrubber into the same circuit and tripping the breaker. With computers such an integral part of business operations, it's very expensive to have a server going offline on a regular basis due to toast.
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