Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league Monday mornings see the resumption of endless coopetition between IT folks and those they strive to serve but sometimes disappoint. The Register celebrates that eternal struggle with a new edition of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column that offers the chance to admit failures and celebrate escapes. This week, meet a …
A few years ago on the wireless, I heard of an ancient culture where the leaders would make an important decision sober and then get drunk and 'review' it. Only if it seemed like a good idea when both sober and drunk would they follow through. People would come up with all sorts of criticisms when drunk that they would not dare say out loud when sober.
The next time you are 'down the pub'* and your boss asked 'WTF are you doing?' you can tell them that all vital decisions need to be considered in both sober and inebriated conditions.
* USAfolk version is: 'in the bar'.
Lee Marvin played it so well.
Lee Marvin got an Oscar for that dual role: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Marvin#:~:text=the%20Chrysler%20Theatre.-,Cat%20Ballou%20and%20stardom,International%20Film%20Festival%20in%201965.
"Cat Ballou and stardom
Marvin finally became a star for his dual role in the offbeat comedic Western Cat Ballou (1965) starring Jane Fonda. This was a surprise hit, and Marvin won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He also won the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival in 1965"
I used to work for Dixons Colour Labs (aka Truprint) back in my just-post-student days.
Our bar was only open on Friday evenings - but as 90% of the work was done on the night shifts, we may have... um... taken advantage of the "lunchtime" availability of a pint (or several).
The fact that we were responsible for operating the (not insubstantially-sized) film development machines (and thus also keeping the noxious chemicals contained within under control), you'd think that they'd have spotted that our section was somewhat less than sober most Fridays... but nobody said a word, as far as I recall.
> It seems strange now but at my first job we had an on-site bar
When I was in Germany as some of the plants they even had (low) alcoholic drinks in the drink dispensers alongside all the soft stuff. You were expected to be responsible however and they would come down hard on anyone who had had to much
The most lethal workplace drinks machine I came across was a coffee machine located a couple of metres from the desk I was working at! It made VERY good espresso coffee, and I started to more or less chain drink it (it was free). I stopped when I realised my hands were shaking!
I was being shown round a non-secret Government data centre who were going to transfer some backup data from 300MB disc packs* to tape for us. They were very proud of their new auto-feed tape drive with a self closing door that would stop if it hit an obstruction (usually the lever to secure the tape reel) and demonstrated it with a packet of cigarettes*.
They then admitted that they often used to put their fingers in the way (especially if they were non-smokers) to demonstrate but the week before one of them had used his smokes and ended up with a very crushed packet after the stop sensor failed. They were a lot more cautious after that!
*This was a long time ago!
I might have been involved in a few of these daring escapades. Escaped with just a noticeable narrowing of the old cranium.
We'd ask new hires if they were brave enough to stand in the way of the elevator doors as they were closing. The sensible ones told us to fuck off.
But the real test was to substitute just the head (the bit on top of the neck) in the way of the door transit. Of course I had to show the younger fools what I meant.
Next time I think I'll use a watermelon.
I remember when the mother company insisted in having a "cage" inside our data center. They proceeded to build one and made quite a few obvious mistakes in actually securing it. We had great fun trolling them and their CCTV system.
Once, on a Friday just after 5 pm, we went under the raised floor and placed a soccer ball inside, being careful to not open tiles that were covered by their CCTV cameras. We then called their emergency line and asked them to send someone over "so we could have our ball back". They refused to take us seriously and on Monday when one of their engineers needed access, they raised all sorts of alarms. We obviously knew nothing about how the ball would have appeared in their cage, but requested it back. We were not given back the ball.
After more cameras were placed, we decided to up the ante and placed a "skippy" ball inside one of their half empty racks, this time not asking for our ball back.
They found the ball, admitted defeat and asked us to tell them how it was possible that we gained entrance to their "secure facility". We gave them a full list of all methods we thought of, which resulted in the cage being extended above the ceiling and under the floor, as well as "proper" locks instead the ones that could only be bought with one key installed on their doors.
In the US, a well known (and well regarded!) cabinet manufacturer uses the same key for every single cabinet they make, and it's a very well known key on top of it. We asked if we could get lock cylinders with different bittings on them, but their answer was "no". We ended up pulling the latch mechanisms apart on the two cabinets we needed custom locks for and had our in-house access control people re-key them to something else- turns out they are standard wafer lock cylinders, and that was that.
I'd have to check, but the current iteration of the cabinets has a combination lock as an option, but I think the very same key can override it. :: eyeroll ::
Back in the 1990s I worked for a group of companies that included a systems & network outfit, a PC assembler and a computer hardware and software mail order company.
We boarded up the back of the last row of shelving in our storage and shipping warehouse with old crate panels and had an air pistol / rifle range.
I worked in an old building that had a hoist on the outside in case they needed to install something oversized.
One day Facilities Management were doing a your of the building and the guy stopped and pointed to a blank exterior wall and said 'there should be a set of doors to the hoist'. Later that day, I happened to be waiting for a lift round the opposite side of the courtyard and happened to look out of a window and it turns out he was right... the doors were there under the hoist but it looks like someone had boarded them up on there inside
(saves having to have the hoist and fixings regularly tested, but it would have helped the day we had to try and get a 9ft cabinet into an 8ft high goods lift!)
I recall, many years ago, visiting an offshore drill rig, the semi-submersible type that sits on two submerged pontoons. I'll add that, whilst my visit was during its short visit to UK waters, the North Sea wasn't its usual deployment area. Whilst there were watertight doors at various stages along the pontoons, there were no interlocks, etc. - so they could all be opened, leaving a long corridor The workers had opened all the doors and set up a rifle range. I didn't stay around long enough to know what sort of ammunition they used...
In a project that fell onto my lap, very overdue, I had to work long nights to get it back on track. That also meant most nights my team was alone in the office, a large square open plan designed around a central area where were located the lifts, WCs and a small kitchen, with a corridor going all around, desks on each side of it and partitioned sections in each corner for the various managers' offices.
Each full compile meant some 30 minutes of leisure time. So we did what was expected and raced chairs, right until the one time someone failed to negotiate one of the 90º turns and slammed head-on onto one of those manager's offices. An half-broken screen went flying, as did the desk behind it, with everything on top of it scattered around (no clean desk policies at the time).
So we took an extra hour that night trying to put everything back in its original place, including paperwork and personal stuff and, after figuring we couldn't, concocting an explanation to give in the morning... In the end we just blamed some clumsiness on the part of the team member in charge of bringing our nightly pizzas, he'd tripped on a misplaced chair - the manager even praised us for working as hard as we did :)
Especially when balls are involved.
I was just putting the finishing touches on a small cluster of vaxen at SLAC one fine Friday afternoon. The annual Big Game between Stanford & Berkeley was to be the following day. A couple of grad students started passing a football (American version) between themselves. In the glass room. Just as I was threatening mayhem if they didn't knock it off, the ball hit the Big Red Button. Needless to say, a bunch of very pissed off people couldn't attend the game the following day. The grad students' computer privileges were suspended for the rest of the academic year. Personally, I'd have hung them by the thumbs in the Quad as a warning ...
As an alum in good standing of both schools, all I can add to the above is "Go Bears!"
Something similar involving a frizbee hitting the red emergency power-off button on a PDU at the back of the machine room.
Amazing throw, it has to be said. But the 'clunk' and sound of loads of disks spinning down made our hearts sink!
Our other, less disaster prone game was to race around the aisles on chairs and shoot folder pieces of paper using elastic bands at each other. When the DC was decomissioned, we found quite a few of these pieces of folder up paper all over the place. Eyebrows were raised....
In the early 2000s. a colleague-friend of mine went to the USA to visit his then-girlfriend-now-wife and for a laugh he bought us a pair of Nerf guns on the way back. Or colleagues quickly learned to recognize the squeaky-clunk snap of cocking the springs so the novelty wore off pretty quickly (though I still have mine in a box somewhere).
My favourite was always the suction cup darts rather than the velcro tipped ones. Once I managed to hit my colleague clear across the room (at least 10 meters) in a parabola over six other colleagues and their bulky monitors, hitting him square in the ID-badge hanging around his neck so that the dart stuck. While he was presenting something to a guy from a different department who was leaning over his desk, which I obviously didn't know as I fired. I was told he didn't blink or miss a beat in his presentation.
Back in the days of working in the server room, we improvised a cricket bat made from layers of cardboard and balled up packing tape to create what turned out to be a dangerously hard cricket ball. Our server room was quite small so runs were achieved while remaining seated on the wheely office chairs while the bowler searched the server room for the ball, also while seated on their chair. Lots of crashing and banging ensued and questions were no doubt asked as to how the damage had occurred to the walls, printers, tape drives, etc. albeit only surface damage.
A few years later, IT had moved on and us out of the server room. We did a lot of wheely chair racing while working late while updating the Novell servers. One particularly exciting and aggressive race between me and my manager resulted in a tangled mess of chairs and humans as we crashed into the outside wall of the Chief Exec's office .. not realising he was working late that night. A face like thunder appeared around the door and we knew immediately without question that chair racing was no longer an acceptable form of entertainment for bored tech support officers.
"we improvised a cricket bat"
A long time ago in a place called New Horizon Park, us bored night-shift people of ED0618 and ED0619 brought in real bats, and improvised the ball..
The ball was foam torn from SIU transport boxes and bound with Sellotape into something roughly spherical and about 3" in diameter. The 3" bit was important as there was a stash of 3" pipe lying around that was used to transport compressed air around the place. You can see where this is going, I'm sure.
Despite the long corridor used as the 'pitch' being pretty wide (For forklift trucks etc.), it was too narrow for decent shots, so points were awarded based on the batsman's ability to hit defined 'targets' on the nearby walls....and some of us got very, very accurate:-) So accurate in fact that it got boring, and the challenge became maintaining accuracy as the distance between the compressed-air-cannon 'bowler' and the human wielding the bat increased. This distance got further and further, and finally required complete removal of the pressure regulator used to feed the cannon. I forget how much pressure was available, but it was pretty decent!
We stopped when someone popped out of a door half way down the 'pitch' and collected a 'ball' at high speed on the thigh:-) Hurt like hell, I'm told, the the bruise a few days later was impressive!
ISTR that following this, one of the more lunatic people suggested re-shaping the 'ball' into a baton round and playing pseudo-dodgeball. That never took off for some reason or other :-)
Fun times!
Cricket played with a golfball and home made bat in the school canteen... effectively a gloomy, brick room 2 or 3 stories high with a floor plan the large enough to accommodate a full basketball court (one of which happened to be laid out within) with any "delicate" areas covered by thick steel mesh to protect from the flying basketballs.
The game was played for a couple of mornings until the full realisation of the horror of the golfball ricocheting around the solid bunker of a room sunk in to the teenage brains of the bowlers and fielders so that even the underdeveloped risk assessment centres of same realised that it was probably a bit dangerous.
Still stunned today to think no one was hospitalised... Think Jai alia with a ball too small to see moving at a speed that makes it a blur, catching with bare hands... A simple forward defensive produced a lethat velocity.
Ah, yes. Chair races ... Quite common in campuses all over the young Silly Con Valley.
Of course the inevitable happened. Being youngish engineers, we motorized them. Naturally. We had a stock of 12V Gel cells (used to keep the sonalerts beeping in the event of power failure, and long since disconnected as bloody useless). We also had quite the collection of scrapped 1960s & '70s computers with perfectly good motors and pulleys and etc, Steering was rudimentary, mostly friction of one sort or another. Driven wheels came from old, unused carts that used to be for pushing bunches of punch cards and attendant printouts from place to place. You get the idea ...
Also naturally, "Who needs brakes‽‽‽" ...
One of my comrades managed to spin out in the sweeper (fastest part of the "track"), and put his foot out to stop his progress with the main door to the room. He missed, hitting the drywall next to the door. And put his foot through it. And then through the sheet on the outside. Just as a corporate director was leading a group of VIPs through.
The VIPs bust out laughing, and the director just shrugged & decided to see the funny side. Fortunately,
Nobody got fired, but we were strongly advised to keep our extracurricular activities off campus.
We also discovered the contractor had skimped ... the sheet-rock was 1/4", not fire-rated 5/8".
At university the physics building had a long corridoor running down the middle of it and we found that the best way to move accumulated dust and fluff from our side of it to the department at the other end was a few litres of liquid nitrogen vigorously thrown along the floor. It rushed along the corridor in a cloud of white vapour picking up all the dust until it went under the door at the far end of the corridor depositing everything that it had picked up on the way. A minute later it was all gone and there was no evidence left indicating how this dirt had appeared all over their floor.
Obligatory not me, but whilst conversing with a Honeywell engineer back in the early 90s, he recounted a tale of repeated call-outs to a certain customer. A litany of pack and head failures. No-one could work out why the drives/packs kept having so many issues. One day, he was on-site for an unrelated issue and was busy in the bowels of a printer and as many of you of a certain age will remember, printers were never simple desktop items. They were often large big beasts - as this one was. It was a large room and the printer was some way back and not easily visible.
Coincidently, this occurred over an operator shift change. As luck would have it, the outgoing shift didn't tell the incoming shift he was there and being hidden, it meant they didn't know he was in the room. Health & safety? Pah.
He busied away for a while until he heard a shout of: "Yeeessss!" and some mild applause. Curious, he peaked his head around the printer, until he could see the operators. He was just in time to see one of the operators throw a pack on to a disk drive from a few metres. This was apparently their thing. Seeing who could throw a pack on to the drive from the furthest distance. Not exactly the best way to treat the tech.
He obviously made himself immediately visible and proceeded to challenge the operators. Red faces all around.
After the engineer reported all this to his manager, the customer got a very large back-dated invoice given it was not "normal" wear & tear. The operator team got re-staffed.
In Antarctica the nights are long and gloomy. To relieve the tedium, there are inter-base darts matches.* These were / are played over the radio. And there is no bar on entry, nationality is not important, you just report your score when it is your turn. Although one base was in disgrace for having played many matches despite not actually owning a dartboard.
Never let lack of equipment deter you from participation!
* Story as told in Sara Wheeler's excellent book 'Terra Incognito', ISBN 0-224-04184-3
I was there although not at Rothera (where Sara Wheeler went) and we did indeed play darts over HF radio. The loosing base sent the winners some beer or equivalent by the next available 'post'. Once we were refueling a plane from Neumayer and they dropped off a crate of beer but nobody at Halley (my base) remembered when the game was played, it was probably a previous generation of winters who had all been replaced by this point. We even had a wooden signpost to Neumayer in the bar (https://www.zfids.org.uk/1998/z98asm.jpg) as they were our nearest neighbour despite being 500 miles away.
As far as I remember we where honest and when my darts missed the entire board we reported it correctlybut the main problem was that HF radio is very unreliablie so most games ended in stalemate when it became impossible to hear what the other base was saying.
At my previous workplace, a boarding school in Northern England, two of the physics teachers decided it would be fun to play squash with a Super Ball, which is the same size as a squash ball, but much harder and much bouncier.
After a few minutes play, the ball had worked up sufficient speed to reach escape velocity and punched right through the armoured glass wall and narrowly missed a passing PE teacher.
I'm not sure what the physics teachers thought would happen, but destroying a very expensive squash court probably wasn't it...
Given the history of physicists and squash courts, one dares not even consider it...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/worlds-first-nuclear-reactor-was-built-squash-court-180957390/
(for full disclosure, I hold a doctorate in Physics, and so am less a good example than a dire warning)
The first time we went to Disneyland (I won't mind if it's the last, at least as far as I'm concerned), we were having diner with the friends we were traveling with (10-ish people total, four little kids) and I was sent back to the hotel by the concerned mothers to fetch some jackets for the kids, as it was getting frisky.
At my return from the hotel, I flatly announced that the hotel was being evacuated because of a flood.
Everybody thought I was joking, what with us being on the 6th floor and whatnot.
Yet, what I found at the hotel when I went there was literally a stream, quite substantial, stairs-wide, with little Niagara Falls here and there. And three huge fire trucks, and plenty of mildly amused firemen (like - they happened to all be men. Don't cancel me yet).
Turned out two kids from 5th floor got bored, and went to play baseball in the corridor. They were good enough to send the ball into a sprinkler head early in the game, sprinkler head which of course did what it's supposed to do and started sprinkling. Splinkering ? Springling ?
Anyhow - to their surprise, and to mine, and possibly to many others' - turned out that once a sprinkler goes, there's no stopping it till the fire dept chimes in. There's no little faucet to close, no big valve wheel to turn. It just goes on and on and on till the tank empties or till professionals turn it off.
There was water everywhere, and it was not just sole of your shoes deep. Not sure how fast the fire dept reacted (and how fast they could shut it off once they were on site), but at ballpark 30 gallons per minute (could've been double that, so - benefit of the doubt here) - there was plenty of it. My understanding was that it went on for a good half an hour or so.
Everyone 5th and below was kicked out. We were on 6th, so we enjoyed the silence.
To this day, I always eye sprinkler heads in hotel corridors, and my eyebrows go north if they don't have a protective cage on them.
Hallway baseball is bad enough, but ~30 years ago, a group of bored students were stuck in the dorms over Christmas break at the University of North Dakota (USA). For those unfamiliar with the climate of that region, it's a flat high plains environment. Winter is cold and notoriously windy. Daytime highs can stay under 0°F that time of year. Nightime lows can reach -40° (side note. -40° is an awfully convenient temperature, since the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales converge there).
So clearly baseball is out. What are our enterprising Sioux fans bound to do? Yep, open all the windows, shove towels under strategic doors, stopper some sinks, flood the hallways, and have some hallway ice hockey.
I think they must be one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time, but nobody thought through all the consequences.
Sure, flooding the building with an unstoppable deluge of water is better than losing everything to a fire, but we can do better these days.
Third hand account of someone backpacking around north america, working as staff at one of the grand hotels in some national park or ski resort or whatever, and mistakes the sprinkler head as a suitable place to hang a clothes hanger .. much embarrassment as the hotel gets evacuated..
The electronics room at our high school had its back 1/3rd of floor area covered with old television picture tubes (cathode-ray tubes), simply lying face-down on the floor tiles. The middle 1/3rd of the floor space was taken up by chairs with attatched little writing tables, the front 1/3rd was empty, and one side of the room had the test/repair benches.
Our instructor was the advisor for the golfing club, and had a bag of golf clubs he kept in the unlocked storage room, behind his desk at the front of the room.
A rubber end-cap pulled off one of the chair/desks served as the golf ball. The exterior door at the front left of the room was the "hole" (target).
Tee-off was back among the CRTs. The rule was that you had to stand straddling one of the CRTs. The chair/desks served as a sand trap.
The instructor was sometimes gone for extended periods. One day he returned unexpectedly, opening the door just as someone scored a "hole-in-one", the "ball" bouncing off the partially-opened door, off the instructor's desk, and onto the floor behind it.
Between the entire class laughing uproariously, and the instructor trying to track and identify the whizzing object, he did not notice the player surreptitiously sliding the golf club down the back of his leg, the back of his knee, his ankle, and his foot so that the club lay flat on the floor among the CRTs -- invisible from the front of the room.
And me? I never played. I would move to the test bench farthest from the tee-off area, cringing as I imagined all the ways this game could go horribly, horribly wrong.
"What's the dumbest thing you've done in a datacenter?"
Not something I did, rather something I observed - whilst working on-site at an Italian telco customer's DC some engineers appearing in and started tinkering with some cooling-related machinery near to the racks I was working on. The end result of their "work" was a large pool of water sitting on the DC's raised floor panels which they didn't bother to mop up when they'd finished, they just walked off leaving it behind. I suspect some water may also have splashed on the nearby racks.
Can you say "slip hazard"?
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Yes, have played datacentre cricket in what could possibly be a banks DC and a lot of monolithic blue boxes
Printer paper with copious amounts of sellotape and we had a ball.
printer paper box, cut up with parts of the box for bracing and more sellotape had a bat.
Great fun was had until the ball ricocheted off someones head and gave them a bit of a cut.
We called it a night (on the night shift) at that point.
Some satisfying "badoing" sounds of the ball hitting various monolithic cabinets of expensive DASD
This was back in the late 80s
at how many night shift workers here play or played cricket of one form or another.
Or how many have been caught out by the ball* disappearing into places it should not go.
Disc arrays, E.stops, through the managers window, out into the yard and landing in the back of a flat bed truck which then drove off**, or into the top of an open topped electrical cabinet we did not have the keys for... until the service engineer pulled it out saying "heres your trouble sir"
*rolled up packing tape, duct tape, cardboard, rubber bands, or aluminium foil or all the lot together
**we spent weeks trying to figure out how many runs that shot scored as the ball never touched the ground....
There´s the occasional tale of a late night match of Doom (or was it Quake?) that was only caught because the game was installed and uninstalled every Sunday, with a corrupted copy of a .DLL that came with the game overriding the Windows original, that was promptly restored on Monday, except when a script failed to run.
(Memory is sketchy, perhaps it was a BOFH edition, I don't remember anymore.)
Instead of playing IN FRONT of the datacenter, playing INSIDE it, was never disregarded as an option.
Again, many moons ago when I was traveling a lot, one made some firm and like-minded gaming-type friends among colleagues overseas who worked for the same firm/conglomerate, which was big enough to have it's own 'Global ATM network' linking the various establishments together*. Never could get people to agree on the policing of traffic across international boundaries!
I got a gentle talking to re international bandwidth use by the Quake server I put under the floor for 'teambuilding' matches:-) Gotta love those mines-)
* In those days, we had a whole /8 allocated to us, and router 89.0.25.1 ruled the roost.
Doom first appeared when I was working in a campus IT department. The dorm networks slowed to a crawl -- mind you, this was in the days when networking gear was expensive kit, so dorm floors were on hubs, not routers.
At a staff meeting one of the network admins told everyone he'd heard of setting up a Doom-killer server. It would scan networks for game activity, and when found would place a seriously bad-ass character right behind each player, and Boom. I think he was given permission to look into it.
Ultimately I think it worked simply to educate users about the cause of the network slowdowns, and ask that networked gaming be done only in the evenings. Seemed to work, at least enough for the U to function, though the whole episode gave the department enough ammo to get approval for ongoing network upgrades.
Cricket was one past time in the warehouse, Along with Rounders and football, the balls where old pallet wrap and bats what ever we could find, Even to the point as the warehouse supervisor we just carried on until the office wallers devided theyd get in on the action, the order and finance girls joined in and the materials managers, every lunchtime the offices would empty and the fun would begin.
At one point even two of the directors got in on the action.
What they didnt know about was the obligatory pallet truck races and swivel chaor bowling.
I will say we never caused any damage as that was the rule any damage was out of your wages, and those radios werent cheap.
what was worse i was the health and safety rep as well!!!!!!!
Way back at the start of my career in the 70s I worked in an office right outside the machine room. The building was 1960s concrete and glass so there were structural concrete columns at regular intervals. I wondered why one of them had a 20 cm gouge in it. Apparently some bored operators had dismembered a decomissioned 2314 disk pack and used one or more of the platters as frisbees. I think they stopped when they saw what it could do to the concrete.
The design of a former employers datacentre was laid down prior to the widespread deployment of virtualisation, but the building completed after - as a result about 6 rows of 2 large 24 row data halls were occupied.
The second of these hadn't even been fitted with racks, so how's a CIO to use a multi-million pound, hermetically sealed, cavernously large and empty room? Why, as a space to learn to fly his RC helicopter and drone of course!
Back in the day, I worked in an engineering firm who had a team of draghtsman - yes, they were all men at the time. The pens used a permanent ink. An error was removed by using a hard, gritty rubber stick, green in colour and about half an inch long. One of these was usually loaded into a handheld drill-like device which did the 'rubbing' for you.
Big bottles of Carbon Tetrachloride were also present - it's banned now as a carcinogenic - and used to degrease the acetate drawing sheets. One of the draghtsmen discovered that an eraser dropped into Carbon Tet. swelled up after several days and took on a very bouncy quality - perfect for throwing around the office, at people and things. Each 'hit' left a large, wet, smudge of green and I gather to took some explaining to justify why the analogue switchboard, staffed by a the very put-upon-but-game Vanessa, needed quite so many service visits to remove some kind of rubbery deposit which kept getting into the switch wafers, preventing several extensions from working. The games were stopped shortly after the business invested a huge sum in their first CAD workstation and found the keyboard kept failing...
Here's one for the oldies:
Decades ago I worked as the Ops Mgr with a large IBM Mainframe installation. I had some concerns about the night shift so I popped in well past midnight.
Lots of jollity, playing hoopla using the write rings from the tape reels as hoops and the EPO* button on the processor as the target.
I wondered where the shift-leader was and after much questioning one of the lads suggested that I should go over to near a particular pillar and stamp
on the false floor. I did and a panel rose revealing the man who had been having a sleep in a sleeping bag in the deep void under the floor.
When questioned the chap said, "Well you said don't be caught sleeping by the patrolling security guys at night, so we are taking it in turns not being caught".
*EPO Emergency Power Off on the splendid lamp covered facia of a 360/370
Michigan State U, back in the day, had a Control Data installation that took up a good portion of the second floor of a building. Their EPO was a big red button mounted high enough on the wall that there was a step or two set up below it so operators could reach it.
Cue the student on the basketball team who someone tried to impress by giving him a tour of the Holy of Holies behind the glass.
Yep. He stumbled, reached out to catch himself, and ...
I was a radio tech in a previous life. The transmitters were in a large hall, but as technology improved, what use to take a large room now took a couple of racks, leaving plenty of room for cricket on a quiet or rainy day. We never broke anything though. Not playing cricket anyway.
There was the day the juniors were bored later in the afternoon in our office space, and were seeing who could throw a high-boince ball at the ground hard enough and get the most floor -> ceiling bounces. Us supervisors weren't too fussed, until a manager came in, confiscated the ball and yelled at everyone because we could have broken something. Yeah, OK, fair. Then we start bantering. Supervisor makes cheeky comment at manager. Manager tosses confiscated ball at supervisor, misses and breaks a PC monitor....
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