Reply to post: Ever had your bacon saved from a frying pan encounter thanks to negligence of others?

Ever had your bacon saved from a frying pan encounter thanks to negligence of others?

Long time ago (late 90s?) working for the NHS in a hospital in Scotland, we had a server room which was protected by a fire suppression system (it wasn't Halon, but everyone called it Halon). There was a stupid problem with the manual/automatic key switch where it didn't have a battery backup, and every time the Estates department did a generator test, it lost power, and switched to manual. They then had to come round and insert the magic key and switch it back to auto, however, they were pretty slow in getting round to it, no matter how many times we badgered them about it.

Cue the inevitable, someone notices smoke coming out from under the door to the server room, and the smoke alarm has triggered inside the room. Fire brigade are on an automatic attendance, because its a hospital, and when i come back from my lunch, there are 6 firemen, 3 estates officers and 2 of my IT colleagues outside arguing that you can't go in because you don't know if the "Halon" has been discharged.

I confidently looked at the control panel, saw it was still on manual, 4 days after the generator test, and said "of course it hasn't gone off, the panel is still at manual because estates haven't changed it back to auto after the generator test, even though we've been asking them since Monday" and opened the door.

Fire brigade duly go in and discover one smoky APC UPS, which gets unplugged, sprayed with a CO2 extinguisher and removed.

Estates got a bollocking from the fire department, and rather than do the right thing and fix the control box to have a battery backup, they gave us 3 spare keys to the control panel so we could turn it back to auto ourselves.

A/C as i still work for the NHS