Re: The power of coincidence
Early on in my industrial maintenance career I was tasked with making a few minor repairs at a paper mill. The mill was in the middle of their week-long maintenance break, and had throngs of outside contractors all over the place - millwrights, electricians, pipe-fitters, you name it.
I had just come back from my lunch break and was getting ready to start on a new repair. I reached out to the safety switch so I could lock-out the machine. At the very moment that I threw the switch, the entire mill went dark!
Other than a few points of light from workers who just happened to have flashlights on them at the time, and some woefully feeble emergency lights, pretty much pitch black. Dozens of workers in the dark, many of them in precarious positions in or on the machinery.
Although I couldn't imagine how that switch would turn off an entire paper mill, I immediately returned it to the "ON" position and wandered away wearing my best "Who, me?" expression. No, the lights did not come back on...
Turned out that the mill engineers had arranged for some type of electrical upgrade to the incoming power feeds, which necessitated shutting down the mill for about four hours. Somehow, word never got passed along to the crews doing the inside work.
Oddly enough (or maybe not), that mill shut down about five years later. Shortly thereafter the mostly empty building caught fire in what was widely suspected to be an insurance scam.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
