Flaming UPS and noisy alarms
My UPS memory happened in London in about 2004. My involvement started with a phone call on a Sunday evening, "Get to the office now, the UPS has exploded". Apparently the main battery failed and the UPS switched to the backup battery. The one that had an unknown manufacturing fault that caused it to emit fire instead of leccy.
My job was to go to our BCO office in Stratford and get the database servers failed over to our New Jersey location and ensure all apps were working. Other people were making things ready for the daytime staff as our normal office in Docklands was unusable By about 3 in the morning we were done, everything was up to date and the business was ready for the morning.
I then retired to a local hotel to get the thing called sleep. About 5:30 there was a very loud buzzing in the room. I just wanted it to stop so rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. The noise carried on and eventually I decided to track down the cause. In a very sleepy state I found the source, decided I could not stop it and went back to bed, hoping the fire alarm would stop soon. The words fire alarm finally woke up some other part of my brain and I realised that sleep may not be a good idea. I got dressed, and because I had done my normal thing of looking for the fire exit before getting into my room I knew I had to turn left and it was 2 doors down. Just as I walked out the fire exit many floors lower, it stopped. False alarm, everybody ok to go back to their rooms.
Ignoring a noisy fire alarm just shows you can lead a user to data but you can't make them think. Anyway, it took about a week before we were back in our normal offices, and a while more before the server room was recommissioned.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
