A tale from College.

[repsac]

I attended collge from 95 to 96. Barely two semesters before dropping out. I was bored. (kid you not) This story, sticks in my mind and gives me a bit of a chuckle. Hope you find it amusing too. It's a shortie.

I remember wandering through one of the buildings (it was called the lab, but that was the whole building) on my way to grab a computer. It was Duke Nukem night and I wanted a good one. As I passed the server room, I glance in just a moment to see one of the student techs working on something. A bit further along the hallway, there's a loud humming sound. Moments later, the tech comes into the lab and says (smelling of ozone)

tech: "Uh. Are servers supposed to get hot?"
(students) : "Not really. why?"
tech: "I was just wondering...So, if it gets hot and smells funny, that's bad right?"
(students): Yes. That would be bad.
tech: "oh..."

as he turned to head back down the hallway, the lights suddenly dimmed and there was a loud BANG that reverberated through the building. Once everything calmed back down, the tech came back into the lab and sought out some other student techs.

"I think the server just crashed. Could you call Dr. (so and so?)"

[Spiffy McMoron]

I think somebody just dramatically failed his computer science class.

[trunks2k]

tech: "Uh. Are servers supposed to get hot?"
(students) : "Not really. why?"
tech: "I was just wondering...So, if it gets hot and smells funny, that's bad right?"
(students): Yes. That would be bad.
tech: "oh..."

Sounds like something I would say. I have a tendency to state the obvious disguised as a question. I tend to do it as way of joking around in a situation I have no control over. But with something like that, I'd turn off the thing that's about to explode, and then act like an idiot.

When working on a program that I had spent a long time on and kept getting a segfault:
"Seg faults are bad right?"
-"Right"
"Are you sure?"
-"yes"
"Really?"
-"yes"
"Damnit"

Except once i got a co-worker pissed off at me because she thought I was being serious. I was testing something that we had been having a lot of problems with and just gotten tired of working on the thing. I eventually got to one issue where I was fairly certain what the fix was, and that would take a long time and put all my other work into a holding pattern. But I had to make sure that what I felt was the right fix, was correct so I asked my co-worker.

-I'm getting this error. What do you think I need to do to get rid of it?
"You need to completely rebuild the database.
*crap, that's what I thought*
-That's going to take forever. Are you sure?
"yes"
-(in what I thought was obviously a joking around voice) Are you reeeealllly suuuuure? Because I don't want to do that.
"yes"
-There's nothing else I can do?
"LISTEN! I KNOW HOW TO DO MY JOB! SO STOP QUESTIONING MY ABILITY TO DO IT!"
-Sorry, I was only joking around, you gave the answer I thought I was going to get, I just needed to be sure. And I was hoping that if I asked enough times another course of action would magically appear, because I REALLY don't want to re-build this database. (although it was mostly automated, it took literally 48 hours to fully rebuild and get everything to the point that I could continue with my work)

I learned she is not someone to joke around with at all. This girl had absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever.

[trunks2k]

I think somebody just dramatically failed his computer science class.

Meh, in my CS classes, we were taught very little about hardware. That sort of stuff was left to the Computer engineers. All we cared about was that the hardware worked and what it was capable of doing.

[Lyse]

tech: "I was just wondering...So, if it gets hot and smells funny, that's bad right?"
(students): Yes. That would be bad.
tech: "oh..."

When I was reading that I had a sudden flash to the Ghostbusters movie and Egon's deadpan explanation of "Bad".

[Dreamstalker]

"I'm a little fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. Whaddaya mean bad?"

[Gawdzillers]

OT: This reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons where Bart is in some sort of chemistry class.

Bart: *about to mix two liquids*
Teacher: Bart, you do know what happens when you mix acids and bases, right?
Bart: Oh, yes I do, ma'am. *pours one into the other*
Green goo splatters all over the windows.

[Cyanocobalamin]

OT: Bart, you do know what happens when you mix acids and bases, right?

You get a salt if both are of equal concentration.

[repsac]

There's that wonderful story though of the professor that mixed them wrong and blew up the lab. I think he put a pound of sodium metal in a sink full of liquid iodine.

[Mongo Skruddgemire]

Imagine this. An oil company's office gets nuked by a lightning strike. I don't mean hitting the lines outside and then spiking the whole office, I mean the strike hit the meter box on the office wall.

The only reason we knew that the computers didn't have wireless mice and keyboards was the burn marks on the desks where the wires used to be.

The CPU's on the server were charcoal and disintigrated at a single touch. The wires in the wall were non-existant. There was only glass tubes in the wall where the fiberglass melted. Why this building didn't burn down to the ground is beyond me.

Act of God you'd say? Forces of Nature, you'd say, Not our fault that the server and 40 computers are now smoking heaps of rubble you'd say? Not the customer. He was all up in my face that our computers failed and what were we going to do about it. It took all of three days before we could convince him that it wasn't our fault and that we weren't going to replace the computers for free but his insurance company was.

It took his insurance company to finally convince him that this wasn't going to cost him a dime and that if he files a claim, they would authorize us to build him a new server, clients, and the network and that they would pay for it all.

Even then he still bitched at us for our computers failing to withstand the wrath of
God and the full fury of nature.

Mongo

Oh and yes the computers were on UPS systems...they too were slagged. It was that bad.