Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
Now they've gold-plated our electricity grid, I probably don't need the UPS. But Sod's (Murphy's) Law says if I decommission it then we will get a series of blackouts.
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Power where I am is good enough that I've never felt the need for a UPS.
I
do get occasional issues where a breaker blows and must be reset, but that's at best an annoyance. Most things come back up. My desktop must be restarted, but it boots from SSD and comes up quickly.
The application I'm running use usually Firefox, but its current state is saved and I tend not to lose things in that case.
I did have an interesting experience years back. I got home from the office, and was about to have dinner when my office called. The night shift was having trouble logging into one of my servers. I could get in just fine via SSH from home...
I lived in walking distance, so I covered dinner and wandered down to have a look I found
everyone sitting on their hands. Not only was the Solaris server that was the main one used down, so was the Novell server. I restarted both and my irony meter pegged off scale as I watched the big mutha UPS they were plugged into glitch and put both down again.
Unplug servers from UPS, find other places to plug them in, pull UPS for repair/replacement, restart servers, do cleanup, and get everyone back on line. At 10pm I could finish interrupted dinner.
Go to bed, and get awakened at 2am by a call from the night lead supervisor. She's trying to fill out nightly production reports, and having problems getting to the NT server where the forms are stored. I blink sleep out of my eyes, suggest a couple of things she can try, and say "If they don't work, leave a note on my desk. I'll send them for you in the morning."
I get awakened again at 2:30am by the night supervisor. She just wants to tell me she could get to the forms and send the results, and I didn't need to worry about it. Er, leave a note on my desk?
The next day was an integration meeting, because we were being acquired and merged, and were discussing how to integrate our respective IT setups. The SVP who hired me said "How are you, Dennis?" and I said "Tired!" and explained why. When I got to the 2am and 2:30am calls, his eyes got very big, and he said
"Why is she calling you at that time in the morning over something that
trivial?"
"It's because she doesn't
know it's trivial. She's trying to do her job and dot Is and cross Ts. I respect that, which is why she's still
alive. She needs to be informed by her boss that stuff like that can wait till morning and she doesn't need to wake me, and yes, I've already had that conversation with him."
She was later released by the company, and my "read between the lines" assumption from the announcement was "Too stupid to do the job."
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Dennis