I got a call from one of our facilites asking that we (headquarters) pay to refill the halogen gas system in their computer room. Since they have their own budget and it happened to be a computer room at their facility, I asked what made them think the cost should be ours. Well, according to them, the halogen dumped in the computer room and seeing as it was our system and we run the HQ Information Technology Division, they figured it was our responsibility for installing Halon in the first place.
First let me explain how Halon works. In a computer room, sprinklers would be bad, ruining valuable and delicate computer systems. With Halon, if the fire system thinks there is a fire, an alarm goes off. If there is no fire, you have 60 seconds to hit the shut-off switch and abort the Halon dump. If you do not, Halon dumps all over the computer room, displacing the oxygen and putting out the fire. Sometimes, in the case of a power outage or power surge, the fire system can give a false signal and trigger the system.
Now for the reason why it was our fault:
the computer room used to be filled with those monstrously large reel-to-reel computer jobbies that looked like something like the CRAY. These 6 foot tall, two foot wide boxes took up quite a bit of space in the computer rooms, but over the years computers have become smaller and smaller. Our current system consists of minicomputers not much bigger than the standard tower PC. So, there was all this space in the computer room going to waste. And, low and behold, there was all kinds of files and old furniture looking for a home. Over the years, more and more boxes and equipment found its way to the computer room until it looked more like a storage room than a high tech facility.
More than once, our technicians warned the facility people that storing things in the computer room was a mistake, but hey, its their facility.
Then one day, during a brief power outage, the Halon system was triggered. The facilities people began to panic, they ran to the computer room to disable the Halon dump (this is a switch on the wall) but so much stuff had been stored, so many boxes had been shoe horned into the computer room that they couldn't FIND the switch. It was buried somewhere behind a pile of furniture.
When I stopped laughing, I politely informed the budget analyst that I failed to see how that was our fault, after all, the system performed exactly as it was designed to.
I don't think he was terribly happy with me.
Posted by sychotic1
at 4:15 PM PDT