BOFH: Elf of Safety? Orc of Admin. Pleased to meet you There's a small-scale war going on between me, the PFY and the folk in Health and Safety. Now your normal, run-of-the-mill person would rather perform a root canal on themselves with a hammer action drill than take on a Health and Safety role in any organisation. The position itself has all the prestige of an unflushed turd …
I would have had money on a high-voltage accident involving a UPS in server room.
"We didn't see what happened. We couldn't see at all until the emergency power kicked back on. Then there was this strange, almost overwhelming smell of barbecue. We've no idea what he did to that UPS; he was only supposed to be inspecting things visually as we understand his SOPs."
We had a rather large H&S manual produced by an overenthusiastic OCD bloke. When asked if I'd read it I facetiously said 'Yes but I got a paper cut' and not long later took delivery of a laminated version that would have given an olympic weightlifter a hernia. I nearly filled out an incident form to complain of hysteria pains.
Heh. Used to work for the Forest Service long ago. I returned one day from the field with a slightly sprained ankle. The H&S person asked me to detail the accident. I wrote it up. It was immediately returned as an unacceptable explanation. I had explained that while in motion, the safety helmet, which we referred to as micrometeorite protection - totally useless for real world hazards, slipped over my eyes, and I reacted poorly to being unable to see, misplacing a foot and twisting the ankle while straightening the helmet. I was informed that I could not blame safety equipment. So, when I asked what lie the H&S person preferred they left and a report was never filed.
So the H&S person was later involved in a terrible helmet accident?
And are they aware that they are breaking the H&S at Work Act?
A badly-fitting or unsuitable helmet is dangerous.
But yes, I have encountered many such H&S idiots. The HSE have spent a lot of time and effort trying to deal with that type of imbecile.
We used to have a H&S lady like that working on our site... She decided to audit the datacentre, one of her findings was that one of the servers (a Sun Fire x4200 which liked to forget its HBAs) was a noise hazard - turns out she stuck her measuring device right up to the exhaust grill on the back...
She also once asked us what the bottle of oil for the shredder was and where its safety data sheets were. We prevented another "finding" by making sure it was kept in the cupboard below...
Safety googles because Health and Safety ->
...is NOTHING, compared to the noise from the "low environmental impact" turbofan hand dryer in the Gents'
For most air-dryers, the reduced environmental impact is because the dryer is so feeble that we give up on in and wipe hands on shirt or trou instead of running it for the full five minutes required to actually dry hands.
I use a set of bluetooth headphones, not noise cancelling but it helps when in a server room & talking to a remote network operations bod.
Used to work in a microcomputer lab in college. Had a pair of non-bluetooth headphones that weren't plugged into anything. Kept the annoying users away
To be completely fair, the noise level in some server rooms is loud enough to do damage to your hearing over time
That is true. It was just odd that she picked on the Sun Fire and ignored my HPC cluster which was a lot louder; not to mention some of the big Sun Sparc boxen we had in the room too.
.... with Advanced IntelAIgent MMORPGasms
I trust El Reg is/would be equally diligent and erring on the side of extreme caution should/when officious officialdom comes calling and trawling for information on commentards with views sharing an altogether different live picture with networked events horizoning.
The Great Game is Changed with NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActive Commanders in a Vast Space Control of Multi Media Presentations of Practically Virtualised Realities ........ Novel Orderly World Orders that Create Destruction and Disruption in/of/with Dystopia ........... ergo IT is/is IT a Greater IntelAIgent Game Play to Play?!.
Parsing amanfrommars is a bit like seeing those stereogram thingies. You have to kind of absorb it as a single picture rather than as a series of words in a sentence.
Having said that, I think El Reg would sell us out faster than a sheep in vacuum (I'm debating on whether it would require an initial inquiry though - no canary's round 'ere)
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