The machine that goes 'Fweeep'
Way back when I still had a job of consequence and meaning in IT, I worked for a nation-wide retail company. While I was acquainting myself with the server room, I hears a forlorn 'Fweeep' noise, like some woefully underpowered Piezo buzzer thats been stood on. It would go off about every 30 minutes or so, and I eventually located a very sad looking server hiding in the bottom of a rack, clearly out of step with every other bit of kit in the place. I kept hearing and asked one of the more sage engineers there - "Ah, that's the HR server... we must never touch it.". This thing had clearly had a very long and hard life and a little more digging revealed that not only was it probably installed by Noah himself, but it had been flooded during a pipe burst, and refused to die, literally run over by a transit van the site was ram raided by some local entrepreneurs through the wall (note: if you are going to have a ground floor computer room make sure that none of the walls are glass and open onto the car park) and extensively fogged with whatever that anti-theft fogging stuff is after a second break-in. The general consensus was that were it to be turned off 1. it wouldn't come back on, and 2. that would lead to something terrible happening to HR, possibly the non-payment of that months wages.
I did track down the HR bod who was supposed to own it, but they denied all knowledge and said it was something vital to do with the Accounts dept. Accounts said it wasn't theirs but it was critical to Distribution... who told me it was HR. I worked there for about 5 years in all, accompanied by that sad little 'Fweeep' noise. Someone had obviously loved it enough to stick it on its own UPS, but not enough to link it to any backup, or patching of the esoteric OS that was on it, or replicate this doomsday box anywhere. Company is gone now - assume someone turned that box off by mistake one day, but everytime my train goes through that business park on the way into London, I swear I can hear a faint 'Fweeep' on the wind.
Apologies for excess length.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
