Stop installing that software – you may have just died Life on the frontlines of tech support can be tough, which is why each Friday The Register brings you a fresh instalment of On Call, our reader-contributed column in which you tell your peers what you've endured in the name of work. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Lyle" who told us about the phase of his career in …
Make your own hot sauce.
Take about a cup(235ml) of good white or cider vinegar, put it in a blender with a dozen or so ripe habeneros (seeds & all ... ghost, scorpion, reaper, whatever), a teaspoon (5g) of sea salt (not that nasty, metallic tasting, iodine-infused "table salt"), and about a tablespoon each of honey(20g) & turbinado/demerara sugar(12g) (muscovado or piloncillo also work, if you can find 'em). You can leave the sugars out if you like, taste before adding. A tablespoon of chipotle powder (10g) (or smoked cumin) adds a nice smoky note, but isn't required. Blend well. Add a little more vinegar or another habenero if needed, to get a Tabasco-ish consistency. It's usable immediately, but bottle it & stick it in the back of your fridge for a couple months and it just gets better ... A turkey baster with the plastic bit from an eye-dropper stuck on the end works well for re-filling old Tabasco[tm] bottles.
Cheap, cheerful, requires no cooking or special preservation techniques, and above all it's tasty. Enjoy.
WARNING! Keep this stuff away from mucous membranes! It WILL hurt you! Do not play with your contacts after handling it ... come to think of it, don't play with anything after handling it. If you get my drift. (Hang on a second ... we EAT this stuff? On purpose?)
Yes, most people can tell the difference. The iodine imparts a narsty metallic taste.
Also note that so-called "table salt" is denser than most other salts. 1 teaspoon by volume of table salt weighs about the same as 2 teaspoons of (for example) Diamond brand kosher salt. Other brands and styles of salt may vary, so I always recommend weighing salt when used in recipes like this.
Regardless, why take the word of some anonymous twit on an obscure Internet forum? It's easy enough to make, and costs almost nothing, so try it both ways for yourself. Invite your friends to try it, make it a tasting party. Report back :-)
As a side note, an eyedropper fitted onto a turkey baster makes for a useful tool to re-fill old Tabasco bottles ... just be careful with splashing.
> Yes, most people can tell the difference. The iodine imparts a narsty metallic taste.
Believe me, you'd not taste or feel anything at all wherever you're in contact with iodine. Your nerves will be gone before they could signal "PAIN" to your brain - together with your skin, muscles and bones. That's what makes iodine and it's iinfamous hydrate so dangerous. It will simply turn you into ooze before you knew it was even there. I also doubt that the iodine salts can do a lot against the intense saltiness of the NaCl at a concentration of 15-25 mg/kg, That's 0.025 parts to 1000 parts or 1/4 per 10,000.
Metals, by the way, have no taste. That metallic flavour is actually tiny amounts of butylic and other low-order-vat acids from your own sweat slightly oxydizing the metal's sutface. The metallo-organic compounds from that reactions are what our senses are very good in detecting.
"Believe me, you'd not taste or feel anything at all wherever you're in contact with iodine."
You have honestly never heard of iodized salt?
Find some. Taste it side-by-side with kosher and/or sea salt. Unless your tastebuds have been ruined by, for example, smoking (or living in extremely smoggy conditions), you'll immediately notice the difference. This difference is magnified when used in some foods, such as this particular hot sauce variation.
Another difference is between a neutral chemical element as atoms - iodine - and a common electrically charged version, ions - iodide, which it prefers to be. In some cases, a few more verbal variations exist. I'm hazy on this particular element, but I think the confusion here is that you usually get iodide, with one more electron than there are protons - of course hanging around with another ion in the opposite state, which unhelpfully does not change its name, e.g. sodium. Equally, if you're offered "iodine", it's very likely to be iodide, but, make sure.
Likewise, fluoride is good for your teeth. The actual "element" fluorine isn't good for you at all, because it turns itself to fluoride and turns you to dead in the process.
You'll regret not having all that thyroid-saving iodine in your system, Jake, as you scarf down your 5-alarm chili just as an unfriendly atom bomb goes off down the street.
Why are people so blind?
Well, of course, in your case it is the fumes from the eye-watering hot sauce.
"You can't go into that room until the atomised chicken dust has settled!"
The glass window from the control room where I was, through to "that room", had a windscreen wiper on it, and although they might have been exaggerating with the word "atomised", there was no way I was going into "that room".
It was in a facility that performed R&D for the aerospace sector. I can't say more because ==>
"I hope they thawed the chicken first!!"
This is probably apocryphal:
A few decades ago the folk working on high speed trains decided they needed to test the windscreen for resistance against bird strikes. So, taking inspiration from aerospace, they fired chickens at it, which always shattered the windscreen, however strong it was. Finally they asked their aerospace colleagues for advice and were told "Thaw the chicken first."
A good weekend to all Commentards -->
Apocryphal? Probably - it would be very strange to obtain a frozen chicken with feathers.
Geese were also used in some tests. They fly a lot higher than your average chicken!
Geese regularly fly over Mount Everest for instance. Not quite the regular cruising height of commercial aircraft, but not far off.
Pheasants seem to be the most suicidal birds. My dad used to ride to work by motorbike and stopped to pick up one that had jjust been hit by the car in front.
I noticed one day the side of the M! down about Northants/Beds had a lot of dead pheasants at the side of the road. I decided stopping to collect one wouldn't be a good idea.
Pheasants are thick as bricks, about as aerodynamic and have the taxi-to-take-off acceleration of an ice-cream van firing on two cylinders.
And their feathers squeak loudly as they ineffectually flap their wings while strolling out of harm's way so predators can track them even in dense fog.
So slow and stupid, in fact, that it was illegal in Norfolk in the 70s to pick up a pheasant you'd hit with a car.
Which is why poachers of my acquaintance (M'lud) would use two vans.
Driving on holiday in Donegal we suddenly felt a "thump", my Dad stopped the car & we could see the road behind us covered in feathers. An old woman sitting by a cottage came out yelling "ye kilt ma chicken", it took a five pound note to calm her down (it was a while ago).
My Dad always swore that she must spend her days chucking dead chickens out in front of passing tourists to earn extra cash.
So, this is not the one where you offered to replace the rooster, and they told you that you'll find the hens in the back yard.
Or Frank Muir's story, of its time let us say, where his car is nearly wrecked by a lady coming the other way around a corner, who shouts, "Pig!" He retorts "Woman driver!", as he steers through the corner and squarely hits the pig.
As long as the chicken gun test has been around, I'd be surprised if somebody didn't accidentally load with the wrong chicken at some point.
I'd call it plausible - as did the Mythbusters when they revisited it. They'd initially called it busted, but then decided the glass they were testing the first time wasn't adequate.
It was practise at one site, to leave the chicken in the "gun" to thaw overnight. Nobody checked it before the first test one morning and they were surprised to find fur attached to the aero engine they were testing. The investigation concluded that a cat had managed to get in the building overnight and enjoyed a chicken supper before have a good post-prandial snooze...
Round these parts the powers that be have noticed that most roadkill crows have been done in by motorbikes (I think they even went as far as checking paint marks on beaks and claws).
They engaged an animal behaviour expert who spent some time looking at how crows behave on a road. He realised that they'd often work as a group, with one less interested in pecking at food and appearing to keep an eye open for threats.
Apparently when the crow "on watch" saw a car coming it would start calling out "caaa caaa" and the crows would up and away.
When it saw a bike coming it couldn't warn the other crows as it couldn't call out "bike bike"
I can't remember the exact details now, but there was a time when some legal bods decided our team couldn't access the data we needed, so we were twiddling our thumbs for a few days before it got sorted. I'm pretty sure that there will be a vast number of IT pros working with financial or government customers who have similair stories.
The other issue I came across but didn't impact me directly was location-based. Due to some legal minutiae, offshore team members from certain countries were not allowed to work in our base country at all, and to be on the safe side, our legal team banned them from coming to the office. So when we had our onsite team meetings, they would travel as tourists and we had our 'team days' at the nearest pub.
Oh god, this exact thing. Flew across the Atlantic to help troubleshoot/fix a “mission critical” failure. Arrived on site, shown to a desk and they point blank refused to give me credentials to login to the system. Apparently “non nationals” were verboten, which was weird as us “non nationals” wrote the software & installed it. It got sorted out in two or three days. I whiled away the time visiting a beautiful city and sampling the many local beers, which I could expense.
But I did spot an ancient HP-1000 mini-computer from 1977 or so chugging away processing data from the Westerbork Radio Synthesis Telescope (at one time one of the largest radio telescopes in the world) in 1996. It basically had been chugging away since the commissioning of the telescope. By the time of my visit they had set up a Linux PC to process the same data, and wanted it running 24/7 for a year before considering decommissioning the HP-1000. Some old boxes are very hard to kill.
That's reminded me of a piece of inspection equipment my Dad "inherited" for his department when another factory closed down. It was a quite revolutionary, for it's time, 3D measuring system driven by a PDP-8! This would be in around 1990, I can't remember the specific model so I'm not sure how old it was but apparently an engineer almost fell about laughing when he saw it.
"Some old boxes are very hard to kill."
Most things made by HP in their days of glory* were hard to kill. Things made now are hard to resist killing.
* except, for some reason, their DAT tape changers. We got through several of those over the course of a couple of years or so.
With you on the DAT autoloaders. For good measure, when one failed, I had them point blank refuse to accept a report unless we ran a particular piece of software and sent them the report. Said software ran on Windows, we had not a single Windows machine with a SCSI connection which made it ... a bit awkward. IIRC I had to cannibalise a couple of machines to knock one up temporarily, load a hooky copy of NT on it, just to get a warranty repair on the DAT autoloader.
Our next drive wasn't DAT or HP.
When I was reading "ancient HP-1000 mini", I immediately thought of the unstoppable ModComp minis that I encountered at another radio telescope, the VLA in New Mexico. Those have since been replaced. I don't know if we improved the situation.
The scientific data and the means of observing it may be esoteric, but there's nothing particularly strange about the industrial control systems. Scientific installations manage to get funding every 20 years or so, enough to stay in operation.
My boss did his Ph.D. at Westerborg. :-)
ut I did spot an ancient HP-1000 mini-computer from 1977
HP-1000, 1977-1990, successor to the HP-2000 (yes, you read that right). Assembled from a collection of HP instruments, drives, printers, displays, and CPU units, all more-or-less pre-existing units. Connected together using HP-IB? So the older "HP-2000" CPU unit could be swapped out for a newer "HP-1000 CPU". In any case, the Telescope control would have been HP-IB (interface bus)
Westerbork was built in 1970, so it probably used HP instruments, but connected by wires or sneakernet. The upgrade to HP-1000 and HPIB would have kept them at the cutting edge of instrument engineering.
Way back in the mid 80s our DEC support contract was, IIRC, a 4 hour response (might even have been 2 hours) during office hours but once on-site the engineer would continue until fixed.
About 19:00 one evening, and waiting for the relevant part, there was a distant sound of thunder so the engineer decreed that the risk of a lightning strike was too high to continue, and that he'd return the next day! I didn't really blame him, it wasn't critical to get the system back up that night and I wanted to get home as well.
A colleague and I were working at a large bank in the US. We had been given a temporary (paper) badge for the week. Every day we had to go in through the main entrance, speak to reception who would phone for one of our contacts to come and meet us and escort us to the secure operations area where we were working.
On Friday, we parked the car as usual, and spotted the external badge lock doors were open, so we went in, up in the lift to our floor. The cleaner was in cleaning the secure area, with the power cables keeping the door open.
We said "hello" to the cleaning lady, sat down and started working.
Half an hour later the manger came past and said "hi... how did you get in here?" (as we were meant to be escorted every where).
We explained and he said "Ahh we had a power blip on the exterior doors - and they default to open for the first 30 seconds until they connect to the controller." He also fixed the cleaner's problem, by giving them their own power socket in the secure area, and some education.
>He also fixed the cleaner's problem, by giving them their own power socket in the secure area, and some education.
How was the cleaner supposed to responsibly do their job in the secure area if there were no power outlets for them to use within its bounds before this? That seems like less of an "education" moment for the "silly janitor" and more like a design and planning failure on part of the organization.
"OTOH security should have had a problem with an unescorted cleaner being in the server room."
Why? Cleaners can be security vetted too. Being lower paid may make them more of a bribery target, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can't pass a vetting test.
I was involved in world wide games event. One day was "disaster day" when disruptive activities were planned, such as dropping power to one site, unplugging the network, a team is down with food poisoning. I had nothing to do - just be on call.
As I got out of bed that morning, I pulled a muscle in my back ( too long spent bending over low tables), and phoned in on the medical emergency number.
I lay on the floor of my hotel room as this was the place of least pain. After an hour I phone in again, saying I needed to go to the bathroom, could not get up, and was going to wet myself.
5 minutes later there was a knock at my hotel room door - "come in" I said... the person went away and came back with a master key.
There was a doctor's just across the road. (Who did not speak English) and got it sorted. Taking the "patient history" was interesting. "Nephrites? " "OK", "Pulmonary?" OK etc.
After he manipulated my back, he gave me a "happy pill" which eased the pain and made me feel very happy.
A couple of days later I was talking to one of the senior organisers about the incident, and she looked very embarrassed. When I phoned in they thought I was the "medical test case", and put it low in the list of problems to be resolved. It wasn't till my second call that they realised they had a real emergency and needed to so something about it.
I had kind of the opposite once on an exercise I was involved in. In the exercise I found myself in the role of medic which involved triaging casualties and administering emergency first aid, along with routine stuff like dishing out tablets etc. to those that had been exposed to the stuff the exercise was training us in.
I opened up the medical kit and found it completely empty. Given the environment we were in, even though it was training, a real medical kit would have been trashed and unusable after. So I realised that rather than waste a potentially expensive kit on just a training exercise, it was obvious that I was expected to pretend it was all there, just for the training.
So I went through dishing out the non-existent tablets and attending to all the pretend broken limbs etc. with the pretend medical kit and all went well. I did a good job, all casualties treated etc. During the debrief the examiner asked me what I found in the medical kit. As I was rattling off all the stuff that I pretended was in it, they stopped me and explained that the empty medical kit was a test to see how I coped with equipment that should have been there, but wasn't. Whoops!
I upset the leaders of my Scout troop as we were do an exercise in causality extraction and I realised that going to the Scout Hut and pretending to dial 999 (before mobile phones were common) was a perfectly acceptable course of action. We were supposed to bodge up some kind of stretcher and pull them out of a ravine. As I did the Right Thing™, they couldn't say a word...
Beer icon because our leaders loved a drink or three...
For rescue in caves practice, my group of caving trainers collect together out-of-date medical kit from the county's Scout groups. That way little goes to waste and we can see what actually survives the journey out. That guides the full First Aid and Rescue Kit we carry when we are training people.
It's been 30 years since I was on my first real Cave Rescue. Where I was the "stretcher Monkey" - talking to, and monitoring the casualty all the way out. Sometimes, we have to be a little "rough and ready". On that first rescue we knew the casualty had a broken leg and a hip/pelvis injury (found out later it was a broken pelvis), but we had to almost immediately lift her out of the cleft where she had landed and jammed, otherwise the winter water running over her would have finished her quite quickly.
Funnily enough, for recreational trips my group each have a much smaller and more rugged kit. A roll of narrow Gaffer Tape (with only about 1/4 left so that is fits in a small pocket) and three Tampons jammed into the centre of the roll.
For simple cuts: cut a length of tape with the lock-knife we each carry around our necks. (Works both for us and our PVC suits.)
For simple fractures: tape the affected part to the another part of the body for support.
For a compound fracture: pad with the Tampons and then tape up.
Of course we can combine our kits if necessary.
If it's much more serious, there's not much chance of surviving the 4-5 hours average time for someone to get out and raise the alert and for a rescue Doctor to get in, and so no point carrying all the extra gumf!
Yes, the Gaffer tape can be difficult to get off (that's the appeal), but the Doctor's are working in an ideal surgery/hospital setting and although they might moan, it is actually perfectly simple for them.
Hence, in certain circles, the use of 'for exercise' or, if it's a prolonged exercise 'safeguard' (meaning all information not prefixed with 'safeguard' is presumed to be for exercise).
By his own account, a certain Gunner Milligan once sent a signal to the effect of 'German invasion force spotted in the Channel', failing to add the 'for exercise' prefix and, due to other communication foibles, the message got into the wild and ended up in Whitehall.
My dad was in the navy and during one of these exercises on an airbase was assigned to the opposing force (AKA "The Bad Guys"). As such, in the week before the official start he began hiding bundles of broom handles cut down to the size of dynamite.
After the fourth one was discovered the exercise was scrapped before it began.
Rhod Gilbert tells the story of his Grandad in the Home Guard during WW2. They used to run exercises with the troop in a nearby town, were they had to take their flag and fly it over the other side's Town Hall.
They had spent hours slogging through muddy fields and finally crested the hill overlooking their opponent's village... only to spot their opponents riding the bus in the other direction!
"during this job Lyle noticed a very old Sperry-Unisys computer ticking away. He later learned those machines were eventually ripped out of the base … to provide parts for real live air traffic control systems that relied on the same ancient platform and had run out of spares."
During the Y2K build-up, I heard from a friend at GEC-Alsthom that some outdated Apollo workstations suffered a similar fate in the UK.
When I was considering joining the AF (of the US variety, though I did end up at a base of the R variety eventually), and going to visit the base and shop where I might be serving, my visit happened to be scheduled on a day they were doing just such wargames, unbeknownst to me (but beknownst to us). As I tended to a rather iconoclastic, gothy mode of dress back then, and still had very long hair (and was/am male), the SPs (I think they already weren't called APs, Air Police, back then) thought it just had to be some of the wargame planners taking the piss, and I found myself prone in a ditch with one or two aforementioned SPs keeping their guns on me. It didn't take too long for them to sort out that I was supposed to be there, probably only about three years, or that's what it felt like.
And as for the IT angle, it isn't clear whether Lyle was at an RAF, USAF, or other-AF base, but we were cursed with a system known as Banyan Vines, which I rather loathed. Almost put me off the whole IT thing right then & there. I'm glad I did find out it could be better, eventually. But I'll give Lyle the benefit of the doubt, and assume he wasn't personally responsible for that.
... bright and early one fine morning I was on the roof of the old Ford Aerospace Building One on Fabian in Palo Alto, trying to re-align a new laser network link to a building across Hwy 101. I got tackled by a couple largish MPs ... Seems that some military big-wigs were about to arrive to inspect one of our satellites (unlaunched, being built in the high-bay), and the two security guys heard someone talk about "jake's up on the roof with the laser, that should sort 'em out". Myself and the two talking about me were detained, taken to a small room & questioned. Seems the security detail wasn't all that versed in the power output of a 5mW HeNe laser, in their tiny little brains we were conspiring to roast the brass.
We had the last laugh. The laser link was part of the demo that the brass was there to observe. We were "rescued" from the grilling after about an hour, and allowed to get on with it. The security guys got a very public dressing-down from a rather technologically cluefull Colonel (in full dress, but sans tie or other neckware ... which is a whole 'nuther story) for wasting his time ... After we concluded the demo, the Colonel sent the security guys to get pizza for lunch and sat & ate with us, discussing the ins & outs of "modern" wireless (laser) networking.
I was on a secondary site for a UK government agency I was contracting for working on an server, I had powered it off and about to open the lid to add an adaptor card when security came in to the machine room to tell me to move my car.
I was parked in a disabled spot (I am blue badge, so was entitled to park there), but that space was 'reserved' for the ops, which work out of the main site, in spite it been a disabled spot. The jobs worth of a security guard told me basically to move the car or else. As I knew that were no other spaces (car park far too small for number of employees), so I pushed the server back into the rack, powered it back on and left. There was not a operator waiting to use the spot, they where all in their little office on the main site, I checked with them when I got back to the main site.
The project manager was not to happy as it delayed the project by a couple of weeks to get another outage and I had to use the inter-site transport, so a 2 hour job turned into a all day job.
In my experience its more what happens when people who aren't chosen for independent thinking and initiative (not generally desirable attributes in a security guard) are given totally inadequate briefing and instructions.
I had a fair sized run in with a security guard at a past employer who threatened me with physical violence when I wouldn't leave the building with the job half finished and potentially hundreds unable to work on Monday morning. The company had just abandoned having a 24 hour security presence and his idiot management hadn't given their security guard any clues as to what to do with an emergency. I passed up through my line management that I felt the problem was entirely due to his line management and that I felt no blame attached to the security man. Thereafter we were good mates, which was pretty damn useful at times.
Or guns. When I worked for a defence contractor one of my colleagues told me about a security guard, on his evening round, who saw his reflection in the glass wall which separated our offices, this was in pre-open space days, and pulled out his sidearm and fired away. Drinking on the job was suspected.
Not so much an odd reason (failed air-con killed the servers), but the way circumstances lined up to kill the rest is funny,
The "server room" was a little cupboard in the corner, with a wall mounted AC and probably too much server hardware. The phone system's main box was in there too.
The AC had been slogging its guts out 24/7 for years, and eventually the heat exchanger was a solid block of ice and it gave up. This prompted the servers to overheat and die.
The heat from the servers eventually melted the ice in the AC, which dripped into the the phone system's box, which had been mounted directly under the AC, and killed that too.
I had similar, having inherited inadequate air conditioning for the computer cupboard. When the aircon units finally died a quick trip to the local garden centre provided a large plastic plant trough which I could place below the units to catch the drips, meanwhile leaving the door open, putting the aircon in the office on low* and pinching a couple of desk fans kept the servers cool enough.
*Cue lots of moaning about the noise and, "It's too cold!"
Doing the main part of my job ( if I'd been been doing some IT training there I could have bu**ered off. But I was there as a Local Authority teacher so had to do my share...)
There was a gas leak in a big old Victorian primary school. The three decker places with play area outside.
The school was vacated into the play area. Which was overlooked by three floors' worth of big glass windows. And of course there was nowhere safe to take the kids!
As it happened, I'd been banging on for years about the lack of any kind of contingency planning at the local authority level for any kind of school-closing event, even for non-emergencies, like a flood making a building unusable.
It took a long time to identify a safe place to take the kids for the rest of the day, and I stayed on to help supervise/entertain them.
The moral of the story should be that the planning was then put in place. Was it f**ck.
Next time there was a school closing event for several weeks, but not an immediate evacuation emergency- they still had to scrabble around for a ( bodged) solution
Similar-ish story from me.
Working in a busy town bank branch located within a busy town shopping centre, although we were just outside the undercover section, when the shopping centre's fire alarms sounded and told people to evacuate. Shortly afterwards a security guard opened the door and told us to evacuate (we would normally have been phoned by the shopping centre admin team), so we quickly locked everything up and went out the back to our fire evacuation point.
Eventually we were allowed to go back into the premises only to be told it wasn't a fire alarm but a bomb threat... in the shop unit right next to ours and not too far from our fire evacuation point. Yes, it was just a hoax but surely they could have given us a little bit more information and got us slightly further away?
(And no comments, please, about us being a bunch of bankers!)
Some readers will be aware of a large glass walled building on the Leeds ring road. One of the firms occupying it was a call centre that used to get regular hoax bomb threats. Our evacuation route was supposed to be out of the back door, along the path running beside the all glass gable end to an assembly point of the front lawn. Having come from a situation where my work had had a genuine bomb (and subsequently half destroyed by a genuine fire) I made it clear that whatever the probability of the threat being a hoax there was no way I was going to evacuate by any other route than out of the back door and as straight a line as possible as perpendicular to the building as possible and as a far away as possible.
"a fire test...hat was a bomb"
For a "fire test", why would anyone do anything different than for a fire? Was there an announcement they missed stating "bomb threat" or a different sounding alarm they were supposed to be able to identify? Sounds more like a procedural error to be learned from rather than a "that was a bomb, your all dead", blame the evacuees situation
While a possible solution, an evacuation plan is supposed to include everyone gathering in a specific place and be checked off a list to make sure everyone is out so Frire and Rescue are not looking for survivors or bodies that are not there. If the official muster point is not in the right place to take into account "the worst"[*], then it still a procedural error.
* Not taking into account Hollywood-like tidal waves, building devouring sinkholes, nuclear attack or, for that matter, 9/11-like attacks is forgivable :-)
Worked for a while in a central London that regularly received bomb warnings during the '80s and we would get a warning over the tannoy saying the building was in lockdown and to stay away from the windows.
After one such alert, a union rep complained to management that the police had closed off the surrounding roads and evacuated buildings, yet we were just told to keep away from the windows. It was pointed out that the alerts were vague (deliberately!), so any evacuation could just as well lead you in to danger as to safety, and you were better off staying put, in a familiar environment, UNLESS you spotted something suspicious
"It took a long time to identify a safe place to take the kids for the rest of the day, and I stayed on to help supervise/entertain them."
It might have been worth tipping off the local fire officer. I'm not sure evacuation planning would be in their remit but it might have been and he'd probably have been able to leave TPTB with the distinct impression that the school would have to be closed if they didn't get their fingers out.
Something similar here. I was doing some contract IT work for one arm of the NHS in an admin building. On another floor another arm did some admin work. On morning on arriving I was warned there would be a test evacuation drill "sometime" that day.
"Sometime" that day, I was in the kitchen at the far end of "my" floor and had just made a cup of tea and was exiting the kitchen to go back to my office about 60 yards at the other end. The evacuation alarm went off, so I spun in my tracks and evacuated by the stairs next to the kitchen, along with the mug of tea I was carrying, and joined the assembly in the car park.
I was later told off, on three grounds. Only the admin staff were having a drill - nobody told me this. I took the wrong stairs - they expected me to walk 60 yards through a pretend fire to get to "my" staircase. And I had a cup of tea - they expected me to go back into a pretend burning kitchen and leave my tea there.
"What's the strangest reason you've been forced to stop work?"
Maybe not that strange but from my perspective, most enjoyable.
Cast your minds back to 1997 when, just as today, a general election resulted in a change of ruling party. I was employed by a large organisation that had just started to implement a new system at a central government department. However, the new government decided to merge this department with another one. For reasons long since forgotten, thee head of the other department wasn't keen on having the new system. So while coins were tossed and back-handers received to decide who would be the big boss, we humble workers literally had nothing to do. However, we were allowed to book out time to a "Waiting Time" code meaning, meaning we were 100% productive. Alas, in all too short a time the head honcho was announced and the project was cancelled. So it was back to finding, and doinng, some real work again.
One minor amusement during this time was that one of the newly employed consultants was spied playing solitaire by our practise manager. When he moaned to me about it I explained that the guy had nothing to do. At which point the manager went all pointy-haired boss and said that, and I quote, "He should look busy". More "how not to be a manager" examples ensued when said employee resigned but that's a long and even more boring story than the tripe above.
I'm retired now but for those remaining wage slaves who can afford it, almost time for one (or more) of these ===>
Working on a contract as a security consultant, the contract said that we had to inform the (government) client and get their permission before any staff employed by a third party could work on sensitive data. Well, some staff were already working on the contract on sensitive data, but were being transferred between employers, which I considered required informing the end client to be informed and approve. Our client, however seemed to think this would not be necessary. it is the only time I have unwittingly thumped my desk while on a call with the (useless) client rep. I would have been the one to rat on them to the government security organisation (which I suspect would have been at least rather embarrassing).
Eventually I went up through my company management team and got a senior client person to see sense and inform the end client of the change of employment, so all was well, but for an end client where any incident on site gets a question asked in the House of Commons the same day I really did not want to take any risks. I suppose I was being a bit of a pedant, but then that is what security consultants are supposed to do.
Not exactly IT, but still tech: Cooling water in very large engine training facility brand-new cooling system (10,000 gallon tank) fouled from contamination (oil, fuel, non-water coolants) in old pipes on very first flow. Full shutdown for months for cleaning and redesign. Still haven't fully exercised the newest engine -- which required this cooling system -- due to funding/blame delays.
(I've been waiting since February to tell this story. We warned the customer that their pipes were contaminated, but they insisted both connecting and running a new system (and pipes) to old lines. Not going into detail since the customer is government/military.)
Years ago, in a security tech conference far away, the company ran a Capture The Flag contest to demonstrate to customers how good their security technology was. Target system was a Windows XP box, Service pack 0, with the product installed with default settings. They staged some 'low hanging fruit' prizes so that participants could win something, but full system compromise was never achieved.
That is, until I ended up with physical control of the game infrastructure. I may not have won by the spirit of the game, but rolling the server rack out of the hall unchallenged is still a successful security breach.
Just like this story on Reg, we sometimes forget that physical security is as important as electronic security.
If you're going to pay me to sit around and not work, what incentive do I have to point that out? As a civilian myself who has never served, I would have been interested in talking to those involved in the war games to learn about how it was going, what "our side" was strategizing, etc. Either I'd get some interesting insight, or they'd decide I was a "spy" and what the hell I'd play along with that gag since its safe to assume the play acting would mean any "torture" would be pretty comfortable to endure!
While I understand the sentiment, and I'd never cause a stink if other people were enjoying the break and my saying something would ruin that for them, there is a very good reason.
Boredom.
The longest stretch I did being paid to do nothing was about two weeks. And I was bored out of my skull. My job for those weeks was literally to occupy a seat in an office so that the position (which I was utterly unqualified for) was occupied. I was not expected to actually do anything other than sit there until the regular person returned. And no, there was no internet, there wasn't even a computer on the desk, the web had only been invented the year before, and nobody in that place saw any usefulness for computers or networks yet.
My work is typically entertaining, except for the watching progress bars bit. And I've been known to take that as an opportunity to go off the clock and duck out for a snack, if looking around doesn't find me something interesting to do.
A PDP-8 was the first computer I got my hands on (Saturday mornings only), courtesy of the IT guy.
I had to enter the tape loader initialiser program manually on the toggle switches on the front panel, depress the 'Run' switch and the tapes would start to spin
- and maybe jump off the spiders, unreeling as they flew across the room.
Happy days; Good while they lasted !
Then we moved to a PDP-11 and that was the end of my little gallop.
The ICl operators at my first job were impressed by the fact that Univac tape drives could be started with the glass down and liked to do that until one day the outer side of a tape spool fell off the other bits and 2700 feet of tape went corkscrewing all over the room.
This will be confirmed by any Univac operator except those from a certain large dairy operation, whose tape drives were intercepted on the road and redirected to our place by the salesman.
Long lead time on those tape drives in '79.
I used to work for a company who had a secure underground control facility. Airlock doors. UPS and generator backups etc.
Every week they performed a test of the UPS/generators. The shift supervisor would get up from his desk at some point during the shift and pull the breaker to cut power to the facility. A big red light would start flashing to confirm they were on UPS power which would be tested for 20 minutes before firing up the generator which would be tested for a bit before restoring power.
Then there was a real power cut... The air conditioning apparently wasn't wired in to the internal power but instead to the non-protected supply of the office above. Within a few minutes it got so hot and stuffy that the supervisor had to order all staff to activate full DR plans and evacuate the facility.
Most frightening instance of having to stop work, from my pre-IT days as a chemical engineer.
I was in my uni industrial year assigned to a chemicals manufacturing site in deepest Blighty, and had travelled from head office a couple of hours to the site. I was to do (continue) a heat balance on a system of reactors mixing sulphuric acid with ethylene & propylene (exothermic reaction), which partly involved attaching thermometers to the uninstrumented plant, work which was part-way through and for which I had been crawling over the plant already for several days. The new week arrived, a new trip to site when I was met by a "what are you doing here? Didn't you get the message? The plant is down, and no, it's not going to be back for several weeks".
What had happened was, the bottom of one of the reactor towers (4 ft diam by about 30+ft high) had literally blown off, and as the 8 reactors were all hydraulically connected, the contents of all 8 dumped all over the floor and the lower parts of the plant, the stairways, the decks, the coolers, everything. You could tell where the nasty liquids had gone since the reaction made small amounts of tar as byproducts, which were called E- and P-tars, and stuck to everything, paitnting them black.
I asked if I could go and see and was told yes, it's all safe now. Walking round where in previous days I had been crawling all over was not initially frightening (I was 21 and immortal) but as my survey went on, I became more and more distressed. With a couple of other instances at that site during my year, like a tanker driver found dead next to his tanker being filled with a well-known nasty, I was convinced my career choice was maybe not the wisest in terms of living a long life. "Fortunately", Flixborough happened that year, and the industry's attitude to safety consequently improved a lot, and I've made the grand old age of 70.
Fast forward 20 years to working on real time distributed control systems and I was supervising a live upgrade to the system software at a chemicals site where another high pressure exothermic reaction was being controlled and the client refused to shut it down for us, i.e. this was a case of being required to continue working when we should have shut down. Fortunately, the client had all their old analog instrumentation still connected and fell back to that, as the DCS was still new, and they signed a waiver. Good job, as the DCS system remained iffy even on the new version (naturally!).
I've never had anything like that myself, but a chemist friend used to work in explosives. Part of the job was disassembling failures with a microscope, to figure out why they hadn't gone boom. It was typically little stuff, like explosive filled bolts - failures were bad, because too many of them and you got dead astronauts. The microscopes had chest protection attached, but effectively nothing for your arms.
They left that job not long after having to clean up what was left of a colleague's hands.
About three point seven billion years ago in Internet Time (call it the early 70s), we were pushing a new road through a property adjacent to mine in Mendocino County. This meant we had to remove quite a few redwood tree stumps. Mpst of the time we were able to roll them out of the ground using heavy equipment, but once in a while we had to use dynamite. Late one afternoon, we set off a shot with the intention of blasting three stumps simultaneously. The first two went off, the final one in the string did not. This is NOT GOOD.
Being late in the day, we decided to knock off and think about it over night.
At about 3:30AM I was awakened by a largish BOOM!
At first light, we discovered the third stump had been nicely rolled out.
Around the same time the good folk of Guernsey decided they were tired of looking at the Nazi-occupation-era fort in St Peter Port (built with local slave labour I was told) and so experts were called in to demolish it.
It made the Book of Heroic Failures as he least successful demolition. From memory:
The first time there was a bang and nothing else of note happened.
The second time the fort lifted off its foundation, but safely landed on it again. Bits of demolition shrapnel were found in local walls, though.
The third time they did it at night to avoid the possibility of shrapnel casualties, and woke the entire island population, but achieved no actual demolition.
At which point the people of the island demanded that the demolitions should stop, and they turned the fort into a museum.
Blaster Bates (remember him?) had one failure - a company that produced the overhead power lines for British Rail had huge furnaces to melt copper and other additives. One day there was a total power failure - backup didn't work - and molten copper solidified in the furnaces. Blaster Bates was brought in but his explosives made little impression on the solidified, quite soft copper. In the end I think that they had to send in people to physically chisel out umpteen tons of copper.
Flixborough.
Remember that one happening in my first year at UEA.
Prof. McKillop used it in a seminar to illustrate why chemists could make a decent living in the stock market. "Who else can predict that the price of everything from nylon shirts to bleach is going to soar in the next 9-12 months because of the shortage of precursor chemicals?"
Never fix cyclohexane pipes with duct tape, especially if they run parallel to dry steam lines.
I once had to 'down tools' because my supervisor was a keen cyclist who has been involved in a cycling accident and rang me to say he was nearby and had broken his arm in an accident
I suspect he was trying to break the land-speed record in Richmond park (London). But the offender was a flock of geese crossing his path and scoring a direct hit to his head.
The poor lad had jokes about it for years. When we got to the hospital, the A&E doctor chuckled when he was explaining what happened. Something about "you got goosed while cycling? Well done!"
Many years ago, when I was working for a company that did a lot of military work (for which I had to sign the OSA*) I went to visit a site where they were developing a new type of armour. My credentials allowed me access to the site as a visitor, and the rule was that visitors had to be escorted at all times whilst on site. Entry checks were quite strict, too.
Once there, my host showed me the work they were doing and I made notes on how we could adapt some of it to our own needs; no specifics, of course, for security. At lunchtime, my host said they needed to run a few errands so would I be OK going for lunch on my own. They pointed out where the canteen was (across a green and through a particular door). I queried that, as I only had a visitor badge, I would be challenged - no problem, they replied - just put it in your pocket and you'll be able to roam without an escort. There was no requirement for staff to display ID, just visitors, so that was what I did and wasn't challenged at all. Quite the reverse of my own employer where you had to display your ID at all times, else you'd quickly find yourself having your path blocked by security.
It was a looong time ago, but anonymous as the OSA never runs out :)
* UK Official Secrets Act
Get a blank piece of paper and write "I know if I break any law I can be prosecuted for it" and sign and date it. Annoyed the fuck out of the bureaucrats when their legal team agreed that this was better than a coerced signature on something that only a lawyer would be expected to understand.
I was asked to run some Cat5 into a workshop because the occupants, who'd previously resisted any attempt to put computers in there, decided they now couldn't live without one and why hadn't I done it already? This was obviously a 'do it by this afternoon or your boss will hear about it' sort of deal.
As usual I diligently checked the asbestos register and discovered that the dividing wall between the workshop and the main corridor (easiest run back to the local switch) was plastered in the stuff. Fortunately the wall of the room adjacent to the lab was clear, so I could just swerve the cable in earlier and approach from the side. Sorted.
I climbed my steps, pushed aside a ceiling tile and poked my head in. A quick sweep of the torch revealed something akin to to the surface of the moon, with dust and rocks everywhere.
You know those moments when your reptilian hindbrain is way ahead of you? It held my breath on my behalf, as I swung the torch around to see a foot wide hole smashed through the asbestos-infested wall. A contractor had run a dust extraction pipe with all the finesse of a rodeo bull in a mosh pit, leaving the entire ceiling void peppered in death dust. No cable for you, workshop guys.*
That mess was still being swept under the carpet when I left six months later.
* yes, I could have come up with alternative runs, but they were being dicks about the whole thing and telling me precisely where and how things needed to happen, so I took them at their word :)
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