The Vent and Rant Thread

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Hello, Cinisajoy. I gather my war story above had resonance for you?
______
Dennis

Just one sentence. I thought I recognized you. Or your style anyway.
So Hi if I know you and Hi if I mistook you for someone else.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I didn't say which five days should be your work week.

My hours have historically been flexible, and not always Monday through Friday, 9-5. At one employer, they were more like 10-6, because the shop had a night shift, and I was the resident sysadmin/network admin/telecom admin. It was useful to be there during transition to make sure the night crew had everything working as expected.

When I was self-employed in a different field, this strategy worked well. It's not working at all with this business.

The following day, I was in a meeting including the SVP/Operations I reported to. He said "How are you?", and I said "Tired!", and explained why. When I got the the calls at 2am and 2:30am, his eyes got very big and he said "Why is she calling you at those hours over something so trivial?" "Larry, it's because she doesn't know it's trivial. She's trying to do her job, and dot the Is and cross the Ts. I respect that, which is why she's still alive. She needs to be told the sky won't fall if she can't send the reports that night, and yes, I've already had the conversation with her boss." She was later released by the company for reasons I parsed, reading between the lines, as "Too stupid to do the job."

Believe it or not, I had a job not dissimilar to this, in the late 70's, early 80's. I gave it up primarily due to the folks like her, that sadly, didn't leave the company.

<...>

I interact with the self-publishing crowd elsewhere, and am at the point of giving up. There is a simply astonishing level of ignorance and wishful thinking.

What I object to is the cognitive dissonance of "well, I'm going to be my own PUBLISHER, take charge of all of this, pay for everything (me: "...") myself and keep the profits myself" coupled with "I suck at sales, and I refuse to read up on the topics I ought to, to call myself a publisher, or even anything CLOSE." I truly don't understand the refusal to learn what you need to know to run the business you've undertaken (publishing).

My basic response summarizes as "Write because you have to, and cannot imagine not writing. Self publish because you can. Do not do it expecting to make actual money, because you won't! If you can't deal with that, find another hobby."

Yes, but that's the thing, isn't it? They don't think of it as a hobby--they want to be PAID for it, but don't want to do what that part entails. Twice in the life of this business, I've created "self-publishing checklists" that have lists of typical publisher tasks, and suffice it to say, every time I give them out to clients, they disappear. LITERALLY. The amount of real work involved freaks them out.

If I were you, I'd raise prices, look at expanding my product line, and distill the answers to the most common self-publishing questions into a short FAQ that could be attached as a canned response to most of the unrelated to job in progress questions, to cut down the time required to deal with them. I'd also be firmer with problem children about just what I did, when I did it, and what they could expect for what I charged. And at some point, you have to draw a line, because you reach a state where no amount of money is adequate compensation.
______
Dennis

We are actually doing some of those things. Where I always run into issues, myself, though, is how one determines WHEN a client has reached that point. We don't charge hourly (for good reasons, mind you); we charge by the project. The client thinks that their questions are perfectly reasonable. For example: when they want to pay us to do a POD interior for them. Now, our prices are industry prices--not AUTHOR prices. But they don't know and understand things like trim sizes, font sizes, what fonts they want, what recto and verso are, etc. So, we have a form for them to use, to give to us. Not one in 10 can fill it out, not even partly, and of course, THEN, there's a bunch of emails back/forth in what's the best trim size, what font they want, do they want a fleuron, etc. To their mind, those are reasonable questions, and our answers are part of the service. To my mind, they should know those answers when they come to us in the first place, or damn near it. (Part of the problem with this precise scenario is, how do you define this? You can't very well say, on one's website "we don't provide service." It's a poser.)

We don't time-track every single email. I suppose we could, but you know how much time (no pun intended) time-tracking in detail takes.

I don't hold out much hope that I'll ever come up with a reasonable way to say "10 emails is enough," or whatever metric we use. It's a weird one; it's not a problem I've ever run into, or not known how to address, in any other line of work.

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Just one sentence. I thought I recognized you. Or your style anyway.
So Hi if I know you and Hi if I mistook you for someone else.

I don't know if you know me or not, though I suppose having a distinctive style is a plus.

If it helps to narrow it down, I grew up in Philadelphia, have lived in NYC for about 30 years, and post under my real name. I've never felt the need for an alias online, and have never used one.

I believe there is another Dennis McCunney in Philadelphia that is a cousin of some sort, but we've never met. (Great granddad came over from Ireland and became a parish undertaker in Philly. Granddad married out of the faith, and got disinherited. Dad compounded the felony by marrying a British girl in WWII. So I'm from the black sheep side of the clan, and the other relatives are all folks I don't know.)

I do occasionally get elsewhere like trips to CA and Chicago, but for the most part you might meet me in the Northeast.

Other than that, you might have encountered me elsewhere online, but again, it would be under my real name.

Hello back.
______
Dennis

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I don't know if you know me or not, though I suppose having a distinctive style is a plus.

If it helps to narrow it down, I grew up in Philadelphia, have lived in NYC for about 30 years, and post under my real name. I've never felt the need for an alias online, and have never used one.

I believe there is another Dennis McCunney in Philadelphia that is a cousin of some sort, but we've never met. (Great granddad came over from Ireland and became a parish undertaker in Philly. Granddad married out of the faith, and got disinherited. Dad compounded the felony by marrying a British girl in WWII. So I'm from the black sheep side of the clan, and the other relatives are all folks I don't know.)

I do occasionally get elsewhere like trips to CA and Chicago, but for the most part you might meet me in the Northeast.

Other than that, you might have encountered me elsewhere online, but again, it would be under my real name.

Hello back.
______
Dennis

It would have been online somewhere. I used to hang out at a self-publishing forum until well the "writers" had more ignorance than intelligence.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

When I was self-employed in a different field, this strategy worked well. It's not working at all with this business.

That's a function of the business you are in and the clients you deal with. It does not come as a surprise.

Believe it or not, I had a job not dissimilar to this, in the late 70's, early 80's. I gave it up primarily due to the folks like her, that sadly, didn't leave the company.

For the most part, I was happy there. The big part was figuring out my boss was a stress puppy, who needed to be in a nervous tizzy to function. If there was nothing to be nervous about he'd unconsciously create something so he could behave in his accustomed manner.

But he wasn't technical, knew he wasn't technical, and relied on me for that. (Indeed, I once threw him out of the computer room because machines misbehaved in his presence. "But I just wanted to ask..." "If you stay here, something will fail. I'll come see you!") When he had a technical need, he assumed I would do the research, and present him with specs for what he needed to buy, at the best price that would do the job. He didn't try to second guess me. His sole concern was getting the President of the company to approve the budget.) I also ghost wrote some of his correspondence because he thought my English skills were better than his.

What I object to is the cognitive dissonance of "well, I'm going to be my own PUBLISHER, take charge of all of this, pay for everything (me: "...") myself and keep the profits myself" coupled with "I suck at sales, and I refuse to read up on the topics I ought to, to call myself a publisher, or even anything CLOSE." I truly don't understand the refusal to learn what you need to know to run the business you've undertaken (publishing).

Like I said, ignorance and wishful thinking.

Yes, but that's the thing, isn't it? They don't think of it as a hobby--they want to be PAID for it, but don't want to do what that part entails. Twice in the life of this business, I've created "self-publishing checklists" that have lists of typical publisher tasks, and suffice it to say, every time I give them out to clients, they disappear. LITERALLY. The amount of real work involved freaks them out.

And beyond that, even if you do the work, success is unlikely.

I tell folks about stats I saw from the ABA back before the Internet Ate the World, and all publishing was traditional and print. There were over 50,000 titles a year, nearly a thousand a week, being published in the US. Who would buy and read them all? Most were not bought and read. The failed to find an audience, died on the shelves, and got returned for credit and remaindered. The publishers were all betting enough titles would sell to cover the losses on the ones that tanked, and make them enough money to remain in business.

Now we have the Internet and self-publishing, and it's more like a thousand new books a day. The same question and answer above applies, but the bar has been enormously raised. You must write an excellent book. You must do a lot of work to get it into a decent form for self publishing. You must do an enormous amount of work to promote yourself and your work, and let the audience that might be interestrd know you exist.

But most of all, you need a benevolent deity to work a miracle for you and give you a giant economy sized helping of luck. You will not be lucky.

But frightening away some clients with such a checklist might be a feature, as they are likely the ones that will be the most trouble.

I don't hold out much hope that I'll ever come up with a reasonable way to say "10 emails is enough," or whatever metric we use. It's a weird one; it's not a problem I've ever run into, or not known how to address, in any other line of work.

I don't think there is a reasonable way to say it. All you can do is continually reiterate than this is your business, you are at any time working on multiple projects, and you don't have time to handhold and be instantly available to all clients, all the time. At some point, you simply have to say "This is the tenth email you've sent me today about stuff you should have found out before you contacted me. I don't have time. If you keep this up I'll tell you to find another service and stop working for you."

The real trick is getting a feel from the initial contact which folks will be problems, and responding "I'm sorry but I'm fully committed, and can't take on new clients at this time." I'd also keep a list of major problem children to say that to if they come back for another project.
______
Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

That's a function of the business you are in and the clients you deal with. It does not come as a surprise.

MWAHAHAHAHA. Suffice to say, after 30 years of dealing with other development and construction professionals, lo, buddy, this came as one HELL of a surprise to me. Honestly...in hindsight, I'm boggled at the idea that I was ever this naive. If you'd asked anyone I knew, prior to this, if I were a naive person, they'd laugh in your face. Now...I wonder.

For the most part, I was happy there. The big part was figuring out my boss was a stress puppy, who needed to be in a nervous tizzy to function. If there was nothing to be nervous about he'd unconsciously create something so he could behave in his accustomed manner.

Ah, an adrenalin junkie. Never met a crises s/he couldn't love or fabricate. No crisis too big or small! (I know the type well. Had a boss that I mostly adored, was this way for literally DECADES. If things were going along too smoothly, well, bygod, he'd find a disaster to scream at us about.)

But he wasn't technical, knew he wasn't technical, and relied on me for that. (Indeed, I once threw him out of the computer room because machines misbehaved in his presence. "But I just wanted to ask..." "If you stay here, something will fail. I'll come see you!") When he had a technical need, he assumed I would do the research, and present him with specs for what he needed to buy, at the best price that would do the job. He didn't try to second guess me. His sole concern was getting the President of the company to approve the budget.) I also ghost wrote some of his correspondence because her thought my English skills were better than his.


Like I said, ignorance and wishful thinking.

OMG, you're as bad as I. I've chased folks out of the room with something similar. "If you stay in here, the computer will crash." On the other hand, though, I have a magic way of making scanners misbehave. Don't have any idea what it is. It's like inverse-pheromones or something. Ha!

And beyond that, even if you do the work, success is unlikely.

Yes. THAT is the unblinking, unvarnished, and unpalatable truth. The part that they don't want to hear. And, crap, here's the dreadful part about it: we, at my company--we don't care. We're not inspecting their book for grammar, punctuation, or good/crappy story. We is just de book-builders, mon. I admit though, that wince-worthy covers and the like usually prompt me to say "hey, did you see that free cover-making tool over at....?" or the like. Obviously, the more they write and sell, the better it is for us, so, it's also true that we WANT them to be outrageously successful.

I tell folks about stats I saw from the ABA back before the Internet Ate the World, and all publishing was traditional and print. There were over 50,000 titles a year, nearly a thousand a week, being published in the US. Who would buy and read them all? Most were not bought and read. The failed to find an audience, died on the shelves, and got returned for credit and remaindered. The publishers were all betting enough titles would sell to cover the losses on the ones that tanked, and make them enough money to remain in business.

And that, push comes to shove, IS the business model of publishing. Nobody--not even the best editors at Random House--picks a winner each time. And if that were the model, all those much-beloved but low-selling novels of "literature" as opposed to genre would die a sad and quiet death, for no one would publish them.

Now we have the Internet and self-publishing, and it's more like a thousand new books a day. The same question and answer above applies, but the bar has been enormously raised. You must write an excellent book. You must do a lot of work to get it into a decent form for self publishing. You must do an enormous amount of work to promote yourself and your work, and let the audience that might be interestrd know you exist.

But most of all, you need a benevolent deity to work a miracle for you and give you a giant economy sized helping of luck. You will not be lucky.

But frightening away some clients with such a checklist might be a feature, as they are likely the ones that will be the most trouble.

Hmmmm. That's an idea, that is. I have the lists ready-to-go; I stopped handing them out when they unambiguously scared off the clientele. Hell, maybe I'll post them on the homepage of the website (which I just spent THOUSANDS <gasp> rebuilding, to be friendly, mind you).

I don't think there is a reasonable way to say it. All you can do is continually reiterate than this is your business, you are at any time working on multiple projects, and you don't have time to handhold and be instantly available to all clients, all the time. At some point, you simply have to say "This is the tenth email you've sent me today about stuff you should have found out before you contacted me. I don't have time. If you keep this up I'll tell you to find another service and stop working for you."

Yeah, you are likely right. One clear symptom of the situation in which I find myself now is that I am less likely to tell a client to bugger off than I was in my prior life. I think that this is due to having employees that rely upon me to pay their bills; keep their homes, eat, etc. I used to be perfectly content to read a client the riot act; now I'm far more reticent to do so.

The real trick is getting a feel from the initial contact which folks will be problems, and responding "I'm sorry but I'm fully committed, and can't take on new clients at this time." I'd also keep a list of major problem children to say that to if they come back for another project.
______
Dennis

Well, THAT I have absolutely developed radar for. It's what happens after they accept the quote that seems to be problematic. But even just chatting about this has given me some ideas, to try to head this off at the pass. I appreciate that you were here to bounce things off of. I genuinely do.

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

MWAHAHAHAHA. Suffice to say, after 30 years of dealing with other development and construction professionals, lo, buddy, this came as one HELL of a surprise to me. Honestly...in hindsight, I'm boggled at the idea that I was ever this naive. If you'd asked anyone I knew, prior to this, if I were a naive person, they'd laugh in your face. Now...I wonder.

Naivety is situational, and stems from lack of knowledge. We are all naive about something. Your experience comes as no surprise to me because I've been watching the process for some time. I expect the folks at the vanity presses back in the print only days could tell similar stories about clueless clients.

Ah, an adrenalin junkie. Never met a crises s/he couldn't love or fabricate. No crisis too big or small! (I know the type well. Had a boss that I mostly adored, was this way for literally DECADES. If things were going along too smoothly, well, bygod, he'd find a disaster to scream at us about.)

I did manage to not say "Larry, take two Xanax and call me in the morning." He was a gay man with a deep love of theater, in $DAYJOB because he couldn't make a living in theater. (I saw him in a local production where he did a fine job in the role. I always enjoy watching people do something they love.) But he brought his love of drama to his professional life, and I sometimes wondered if at some level he saw his co-workers as audience and he needed to perform in consequence.

OMG, you're as bad as I. I've chased folks out of the room with something similar. "If you stay in here, the computer will crash." On the other hand, though, I have a magic way of making scanners misbehave. Don't have any idea what it is. It's like inverse-pheromones or something. Ha!

I told Larry "You have a mysterious power to cloud machine's minds. They fail in your presence."

But the computer room at the shop had been built out before I came on board, as fast and cheap as possible. I had a patch panel things plugged into where connected things would drop out if you looked at it funny. When I finally got the budget to replace it, I really wanted to drop the old one out the window from the eleventh floor location, if I could arrange for those who specced and built out the room to be standing beneath when I did.

I hired a telecom/datacom contractor to give me a hand replacing it, and part of the fun was figuring out which cable coming into the computer room led to what gear. We got to the point of saying "Where does this lead?" "Dunno. Uplug it and see who yells." There were some incoming cables where we never did discover what they connected to.

Yes. THAT is the unblinking, unvarnished, and unpalatable truth. The part that they don't want to hear. And, crap, here's the dreadful part about it: we, at my company--we don't care. We're not inspecting their book for grammar, punctuation, or good/crappy story. We is just de book-builders, mon. I admit though, that wince-worthy covers and the like usually prompt me to say "hey, did you see that free cover-making tool over at....?" or the like. Obviously, the more they write and sell, the better it is for us, so, it's also true that we WANT them to be outrageously successful.

No, you don't care, nor should you. You aren't editors or publishers concerned with quality or material and whether the book has a prayer. You are paid to put whatever it is into a form suitable for electronic issue. With luck, you can mostly avoid even reading it.

(A late friend was a copy editor on the Penthouse Magazine "Letters" volumes. He commented that typesetters are trained to connect fingers to eyes, and don't normally actually read what they set. He could tell when a tale grabbed a typesetter and they actually read it because errors in the galleys would soar. I said that was a consequence of typing one handed. )

And that, push comes to shove, IS the business model of publishing. Nobody--not even the best editors at Random House--picks a winner each time. And if that were the model, all those much-beloved but low-selling novels of "literature" as opposed to genre would die a sad and quiet death, for no one would publish them.

Not just publishing. Film, music, and TV are similar.

An old friend was an editor at a trade house that was part of a media conglomerate. He recounted a visit from an executive on the media side who asked "Why did you publish those midlist titles? Why didn't you just publish best sellers?" The proper response would be "Why did you greenlight notable bombs X, Y, and Z? Why didn't you just produce the $100 million grossers?"

And I'm philosophical about the stuff I consider crap that becomes bestsellers, because the money those books make makes it possible for the publisher to issue the literary stuff I like to read.

Hmmmm. That's an idea, that is. I have the lists ready-to-go; I stopped handing them out when they unambiguously scared off the clientele. Hell, maybe I'll post them on the homepage of the website (which I just spent THOUSANDS <gasp> rebuilding, to be friendly, mind you).

I looked. Well done.

But it sounds like you are well enough established now that you might be able to afford to scare off some clientele. It's no longer a matter of "OMG! I need every client, now matter how much of a PITA they are, to keep my head above water."

Yeah, you are likely right. One clear symptom of the situation in which I find myself now is that I am less likely to tell a client to bugger off than I was in my prior life. I think that this is due to having employees that rely upon me to pay their bills; keep their homes, eat, etc. I used to be perfectly content to read a client the riot act; now I'm far more reticent to do so.

You certainly won't want to do it as often as you might wish to, but as mentioned, you have to draw a line somewhere.

Well, THAT I have absolutely developed radar for. It's what happens after they accept the quote that seems to be problematic. But even just chatting about this has given me some ideas, to try to head this off at the pass. I appreciate that you were here to bounce things off of. I genuinely do.

If all it does is make you feel better to have an understanding ear at the other end, it's worth doing. If it gives ideas for things you can try, even better. You're more than welcome.
______
Dennis

[badgoodDeb]

Fascinating, guys. Thanks for letting me listen in!
Good luck Hitch.
bgDeb

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Fascinating, guys. Thanks for letting me listen in!
Good luck Hitch.
bgDeb

Exactly what I was thinking yesterday while reading this.

[Freeshadow]

Ditto

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Naivety is situational, and stems from lack of knowledge. We are all naive about something. Your experience comes as no surprise to me because I've been watching the process for some time. I expect the folks at the vanity presses back in the print only days could tell similar stories about clueless clients.

Thanks--I appreciate how neatly you let me off the hook, there. ;-)

I did manage to not say "Larry, take two Xanax and call me in the morning."

I was once so aggravated about Mr. X's drama (I mean, he could scream in ways that I didn't even know had been invented, I s**t thee not.) that I told him if he DIDN'T take two xanax, I wouldn't be in the following day--or EVER again. Bygod if he didn't at least shut up.

I told Larry "You have a mysterious power to cloud machine's minds. They fail in your presence."

He should have been delighted. Usually, becoming The Shadow takes years of difficult training, after all.

But the computer room at the shop had been built out before I came on board, as fast and cheap as possible. <SNIP> There were some incoming cables where we never did discover what they connected to.

Been there, done that. In fact...I fear to look behind my main CPU as I type this. Probably have that scenario right now, sorry to say.

No, you don't care, nor should you. You aren't editors or publishers concerned with quality or material and whether the book has a prayer. You are paid to put whatever it is into a form suitable for electronic issue. With luck, you can mostly avoid even reading it.

(A late friend was a copy editor on the Penthouse Magazine "Letters" volumes. He commented that typesetters are trained to connect fingers to eyes, and don't normally actually read what they set. He could tell when a tale grabbed a typesetter and they actually read it because errors in the galleys would soar. I said that was a consequence of typing one handed. )


Not just publishing. Film, music, and TV are similar.

Mostly, we don't read them. We obviously can't, not and finish them in a reasonably productive manner. And some--well. Let's just say, it's better if it isn't sticky. The tale about the Penthouse setters is amusing, thanks for that.

And I'm philosophical about the stuff I consider crap that becomes bestsellers, because the money those books make makes it possible for the publisher to issue the literary stuff I like to read.

I don't even CARE about tripe becoming a best-seller. Twifright? 50 Shades of Dreck? Good-o. After all, let's not forget: by all meaningful measures, fully HALF of the population is below-average. They want reading material, too. This thought helped me reconcile myself to the idea of purportedly grown women being emotionally involved in crap like "Team Edward" or "Team whatever guy." So...good for the crafters of dreck.

I looked. Well done.

Thanks--I'd love to take credit, but mostly, that's a store-boughten template. Because I'm terminally cheap, I ended up doing scads of the work myself, but I still had to hire out all the Joomla customization. (Wanker CMS, let me just add that. Utterly crackpot ways of doing things.)

But it sounds like you are well enough established now that you might be able to afford to scare off some clientele. It's no longer a matter of "OMG! I need every client, now matter how much of a PITA they are, to keep my head above water."

You certainly won't want to do it as often as you might wish to, but as mentioned, you have to draw a line somewhere.

I've definitely become more savvy at simply cutting off customers that are unsuitable, no matter whose fault it is. Some simply need more than we provide--that's hardly anyone's fault. Some...we just don't gel. No click. But I've learned how to catch on to this sooner, fortuitously.

If all it does is make you feel better to have an understanding ear at the other end, it's worth doing. If it gives ideas for things you can try, even better. You're more than welcome.
______
Dennis

Thanks. As I said: I mean it.

And, a big THANKS to Badgood Deb, Charlie and Free. ()

Hitch

[Rumpelteazer]

Getting a bit tired of the building works in the building adjoining my bedroom. Last week we heard the the downstairs restaurant wants to open on December 20, though the builders aren't sure they can make that deadline.

I had hoped that would mean they would concentrate their work on the downstairs and the front of the building outside. But it seems that they can't break the habit of starting being noisy around 7am in the attic, right next to my bedroom.

The only positive thing is is that if they are concentrating on the restaurant is that it's very likely that the upstairs won't be finished before the end of the year. Meaning there will be no all night New Year party. Next time the new tenant is in the store I'll ask him if the upstairs will be student lets again or not.

[poohbear_nc]

I hired a telecom/datacom contractor to give me a hand replacing it, and part of the fun was figuring out which cable coming into the computer room led to what gear. We got to the point of saying "Where does this lead?" "Dunno. Uplug it and see who yells." There were some incoming cables where we never did discover what they connected to.

Oh my - you brought back the memories [hopefully NOT the nightmares]

As part of my current job, I inherited a network set-up done by group effort over the years. There was a huge UPS in the server room that hummed so loudly you could hear it throughout the ground floor. No one knew who installed it, or could identify any of the cables coming out of it. Not a single cable/wire was labelled, and there was no network map.

I decided to accomplish 2 jobs with one action -- get rid of the neolithic UPS and identify the cabling. How? Unplug the wires one by one and listen for the screams. Eventually I did identify the destination/source of all the visible cabling. And moved it off the UPS to a new, silent UPS.

THEN [drum roll], we shut down the UPS .... and listened for the screams. I was sure there were hidden wires inside the wall that came out from the back or under the UPS that we couldn't get to unless we pulled it completely off its mount. Oh my, yes, there were screams galore.

So, on Friday night, after business closed, we shut down the UPS and pulled it - it weighed more than a truck. And traced cables/wires into the wall ... I was astonished at the literal rats nest of cabling -- people piggy-backed new cabling on top of the old cabling - of course with NO identification. Just cut ends on the old stuff. We pulled out a veritable history of network wiring protocols and materials out of the walls. And rebuilt the wiring [with a map!].

Monday morning came the complaints .... they missed the old UPS hum -- it was too quiet now and people started being bothered by hearing stuff that had formerly been masked by the old UPS.

N.B. That was the largest lead acid battery I have ever encountered.

[CRussel]

Oh, you should have seen the TWO UPSs we had for the production HP-UX boxes at a joint-venture automotive company I worked for in California. They literally had to bring them in with a fork lift, and they sat behind the main dispatchers control panel, keeping all the servers up. Noise wasn't an issue, since it was an assembly line environment. But they could keep the 4 HP-UX boxes and two PCs up and running happily for >4 hours. And the heat they produced?!! But that was one job where money to keep things running was easy to come by. Downtime worked out to ~$6k a minute at that point in the production process.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Oh my - you brought back the memories [hopefully NOT the nightmares]

As part of my current job, I inherited a network set-up done by group effort over the years. There was a huge UPS in the server room that hummed so loudly you could hear it throughout the ground floor. No one knew who installed it, or could identify any of the cables coming out of it. Not a single cable/wire was labelled, and there was no network map.

At a former facility, the company WAN had been built out by consultants. They came in to my shop at one point to do some works, and asked for a network topology map. I said "I've been trying to get one since I came on board. You guys designed and built out our network. You mean you don't have one?" "<mumble>guy who did it out of office and not available<mumble>..."

I decided to accomplish 2 jobs with one action -- get rid of the neolithic UPS and identify the cabling. How? Unplug the wires one by one and listen for the screams. Eventually I did identify the destination/source of all the visible cabling. And moved it off the UPS to a new, silent UPS.

As mentioned, I never did identify all of them. My datacomm tech had a circuit tester he used to locate other ends. My conclusion was that whatever those cables had once connected to was no longer there.

My bigger issue on that line was power. The master breaker panel for the floor was in a closet in the facility manager's office. Breakers had once been labelled, but labels had long since fallen off. The last thing I wanted to do was hit the breaker for the computer room...

We also had two incoming circuits - a 60 amp and a 100 amp. As part of another exercise, I'd gotten a drywall contractor to converts cubicles to fully enclosed offices. The A/C for the floor was inadequate to cool them, so window units were procured. Guess which of the circuits the new A/C plugged into? Come mid-summer, the compressors on the A/C units would all kick in at once and we'd have a power event.

And the building was old enough that the incoming circuits were protected by fuses, not breakers, so I made several trips over time to the local hardware store for replacements, and had a conversation with the building super about getting a key to the basement so I could get access at night when he wasn't available.

The company decided they really needed two 100 amp circuits, and tasked me to find an electrician. The guy I hired said doing it properly, including city permits and official ConEd involvement would be about $12K. The company didn't want to pay that. He said he could just come in and do it, sans official involvement from city and ConEd a lot cheaper, and had done so elsewhere, but my employers didn't want the risk. So he wound up replacing the fuses with proper breakers, and put an 80amp breaker on the 60 amp circuit to give us more headroom during mid summer when the window A/C units all kicked in at once. It worked...

THEN [drum roll], we shut down the UPS .... and listened for the screams. I was sure there were hidden wires inside the wall that came out from the back or under the UPS that we couldn't get to unless we pulled it completely off its mount. Oh my, yes, there were screams galore.

So, on Friday night, after business closed, we shut down the UPS and pulled it - it weighed more than a truck. And traced cables/wires into the wall ... I was astonished at the literal rats nest of cabling -- people piggy-backed new cabling on top of the old cabling - of course with NO identification. Just cut ends on the old stuff. We pulled out a veritable history of network wiring protocols and materials out of the walls. And rebuilt the wiring [with a map!].

My telecom/datacomm tech friend sends me occasional before and after pics of sites he's worked on. Some of them were "Fire/shock hazard R us", and others were "How did that ever work?". Some were both. They were neither after he'd finished. (He was an electrician before moving into telecom/datacomm.)

Monday morning came the complaints .... they missed the old UPS hum -- it was too quiet now and people started being bothered by hearing stuff that had formerly been masked by the old UPS.

N.B. That was the largest lead acid battery I have ever encountered.

I've seen ones equivalent.
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Dennis