Sysadmin flees asbestos scare with disk drive, blank pay cheques, angry builders in pursuit

Windows NT

"Back then even with the exact same model drives a tape created with one drive could not always be read by another. Plus the weekly backup wouldn't have the last two days' work anyway"

I call Windows NT ... that was before I grew into proper operating systems

The joys of working on a rural campus...

One year, I got dragged to help with an induction day, so I ended up manning the computer centre reception desk on a Saturday afternoon to deal with enquiries.

A friend of humanity wanders in, hammer in one hand and a hand scythe in the other, looking totally out of it. Yep, definite whiff of strong weed in the air.

Potheads wielding DIY/agricultural hardware usually spelt trouble with a capital TROUBLE, so "Hello, can I help you ?" rapidly turned into "DROP THE FUCKING TOOLS AND GET OUT !!!"

Chummy ran off, leaving his toys behind. No idea what I did with the scythe, but I've still got the hammer somewhere.

Needless to say, I was never asked to welcome poor lost ikkle firsties again.

And there was much rejoicing.

Not a Star Wars quote

"You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th Century"

That's Star Trek: First Contact. Picard introducing Lily to the ship.

Yes, it's quite an experience to face an angry mob of some 200 people who feel they have to take issue with the project you are supposed to build.

Have you dodged toxic substances to do a job?

Have I?, I wake up some mornings wondering how the fsck I've managed to make it into middle age..

An OTOMH list...

Unshielded 'hot' Radioactive Sources? ..check

Asbestos? ..check (many, many times...)

Open containers of Sodium Cyanide which were balanced precariously next to various beakers containing various acids (just don't ask...) ..check

Working right beside a bench heavily contaminated with shock sensitive picrate salts? ..check

Working beside a metal cupboard containing several Kg of dried out Picric Acid..stored beside the Carbon Tet?...check (I should point out that this was beside the bench contaminated with the salts above..)

Thallium? ..check (left on a windowsill beside a computer I had to visit on a number of occasions over a period of a couple of years..several large lumps, nicely oxidising away..no-one knew what it was.)

Mercury? ..check (bottles of the stuff in unlocked cupboards, well over 10 litres total volume, mostly contaminated, mostly inappropriate bottles, some 'uncorked'..)

PCBs..check (In the centre of London, mid-late 90's...200 litres of the stuff in an open container)

Various nasty OP compounds? ..check

Being in a sealed lab working on a computer when a 'fridge' right beside it decides to vent Nitrogen (the computer station being amusingly placed so that anyone sitting at it got the, umm, 'full benefit' of the event...ok, not toxic, but even so...) ..check

Exposed to very high levels of SO₂? ..check

Zinc Oxide fumes ? ..check

Lyme and Weils diseases? ..check (Ok, not toxic per-se, but having to get yourself checked for ticks after fixing a computer issue isn't normal..as for the Weils...well, lets just say rats get everywhere)

Laser dyes? ..check (Sloppy, sloppy 'housekeeping', hey they're only both toxic and carcinogenic..)

And this was mostly IT work..exposed to all this (and, unfortunately, more, much, much more), yet a microscopic amount of egg can send me into anaphylaxis..on a bad day you'd almost swear that something, somewhere has a somewhat exceedingly warped sense of humour.

I used to work for a Yorkshire based IT company who had customers all over the country.

One week I was sent down to Sussex on a four-day course to cover an imminent new release of one of the systems we dealt with. On leaving the course on the final day to catch a train home, I was stopped at reception and told that there was a call from my office - this was before I had a mobile phone. Apparently one of our customers in the City of London had a problem with a server, and could I pop in to help out a hardware engineer who was having problems as he didn't understand our OS. Of course this meant that I would have problems getting home that evening, but I could stop at a salesman's house overnight.

So I made my way to the station, and caught a train to London Bridge, and then made my way to the customer's office for an evening appointment. The hardware engineer seemed to be pretty clueless, as all he had to diagnose faults were tools on a floppy that he didn't understand. He was convinced that the fault was with the motherboard, and he would arrange for one to arrive at the office for him to fit the following morning. Could I be on the phone the following morning to guide him?

So I headed off to call our salesman to arrange to stay the night in his spare room. I somehow managed to catch the last District Line train to his house to stay for a few hours, then on to catch the first train back to the office.

Tired and exhausted, I make it into the office the following morning, and start talking to this engineer. It takes him hours to get the system working again. Then once fixed, it's obvious that he has somehow managed to wipe the server's RAID array in the process, so could I guide him through the process of re-installing the OS and restoring a backup? By this time it is about 5pm in the evening, and I've only had one sandwich to eat all day, and most of the staff from our office have already left for the pub.

So I stay on the phone laboriously guiding him through the various steps to reinstall the operating system, which weren't that easy. The process was made a bit worse as we needed to install various patches to the server before we could attempt to recover from backup, and each one of these took some time. I remained in the office until about 10:20 that evening, caught the bus home, and then stayed on the phone to him until about 1am the following morning.

As I'd been away from home for a week on the course, I had no food in, and by 1am there were not even any takeaways still open, even on a Friday. So I went to bed starving, and missed a local event I had planned on attending.

"Crisis is what I pay you for"

Re: "This is what I pay you for"...

Load of doodoo! That's what any trouble-shooter gets -- except when there is no trouble -- then they get "what have you been doing and why haven't I had status reports on your progress". I.e. if you organize things to run well, you are not appreciated when things run well -- only those who are seen as doing well in responding to a crisis are seen as performing "adequately".

Motto: don't create good self-running policies and programs, but only those that create regular crises that you get credit for handling. Saw it at nearly every big company I worked for. No credit for things going well, only credit for when things don't go well and seen as hero in saving the day in the midst of a failure (that could have been prevented by a good plan -- but what's the point in that when such can get you axed as not being "useful")...

Never a truer word has been said !!!

Astara,

Re: Your last comment.

If only there was a way to keep the upvote button pressed for the next Century or two :)

So true ...... learnt the hard way BUT I am unfortunately genetically incapable of creating the 'crappy' systems to keep looking good by rescuing the company at regular intervals. :(

Got stabbed in the back by someone who could & still sleep at night.

[Who was aided and abetted by a Manager who played similar games and was attracted to a like minded soul/'Equally duplicitous Git' :) ]

Never did get the 'Office Politics & Greasy pole climbing' side of things sorted out. :) :)