now I know

[cellio]

One of my small-scale "fears" -- except that "fear" is way too strong a word for it -- is of oversleeping due to a power failure taking out the alarm clock. I have been known, when it's really important to be up early for something, to set the alarm on my watch as a backup. (This doesn't happen often. Once every several years, maybe.)

Last night demonstrated that this is no longer necessary. The unsynchronized beeping from two UPSs is enough to wake me even with the ambient noise of Forbes Avenue with windows open. This is good; it means I can shut things down gracefully and set a mechanical alarm if necessary. (Last night, as it turned out, power was only out for about 5 minutes, so I didn't need to do anything.)

(I guess the last time this happened Dani didn't have his UPS yet and my office was still in the basement.)

Ironically, I came in to work to an unusually-quiet office: things are quiet when the computer isn't running. I thought maybe we'd had a power glitch here that had exceeded the battery in the UPS. Nope, nothing like that: someone, presumably the cleaning person, unplugged my computer. Bah! A UPS won't help you if your computer isn't connected to it...

Comments

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

When I was working for the Army, we had an ongoing problem in one of our installations. We'd put in a Xenix system with a few terminals, and set up a 'cron' job to relay information to HQ every night. And we kept not getting the updates. There were a series of explanations ...

IIRC, at least once we were told that cleaning staff had unplugged the computer and plugged a vacuum cleaner into the UPS. We were never sure whether that was actually what happened or not. Then the person down there working on our project explained that someone else in the office kept turning off the computer (by switching off the UPS, IIRC) when leaving the office at night, "because you turn everything off when you leave".

Of course they didn't know how to log in and do a 'shutdown' command first (and didn't have the root password anyhow), and pulling the plug on a running *ix system can be a Bad Thing.

Putting "do not turn this off" and "do not unplug this" signs in the apropriate places didn't always help. The system was, for a few months at least, turned off at night more often than not. And the whole design of the system involved local data collection being rolled into a command summary that would get uploaded to HQ from each MACOM on a regular basis. (The next stage would involve local data collection at individual bases being transmitted to the MACOM site and processed there before being passed on to HQ.)

Ah, but this was most likely not simple ignorance ... there was serious political resistance to our project. The fellow in charge of that office had to be officially supportive, but really there was only the one worker actually in favour of our system actually working. Feigning carelessness was a ruse. But until my boss explained the political situation, I spent a lot of time wondering how people could keep screwing things up like that.

Not that this has much to do with your finding your computer unplugged -- it's just the story that I was reminded of when hearing about someone unplugging a machine from its UPS overnight.

(Actual, not feigned, ignorance came into play when I was dragged out to a contractor site to look at what they'd written so far in COBOL for our system, and found a) ignorance of the limitations of "dumb" terminals, and b) ignorance of multi-user simultaneous access issues. These folks basically had no idea that there were computer systems that worked any differently than IBM PCs running MS-DOS 2.something. They didn't seem to realize that multi-user computers existed, much less that that was what their code had to run on. We had to move one of them into our office so he could experience working on our system, and then the ideas in the UNIX shell (such as subdirectories) confused him so much that I installed 'ash' (the "adventure shell") just for him. "You are in your home. There are files here: mbox, notes.tmp, to-do. There are passages marked 'src' and 'bin' and a passage leading up.")

[goljerp]

Wow. This story takes "office politics" to a new level... I guess you're lucky that someone didn't "accidentally" rub their bulk tape eraser (i.e. big magnet) all over the disk drives...