Welcome to the first edition of the “DotMania”. While my other blog is normally a slice of live with a social networking and mobile angle, this weekly series will be first hand accounts of “Dilbert” meets “The Office”. No deep significance here, just some comic relief from the stressful workplace. I encourage all of you to send me your experiences for inclusion in future articles.
In the early Internet days, I was once called at 2:00 am by my head of development. The message was that there was a power outage in our office. Since our service was partially dependent on servers in our office, as well as our data service, we had a big problem.
The company syndicated content and the daily “dump” from some of our largest suppliers would be arriving at 5:00 am. These were the days of less than robust content delivery, so if you miss it, you were stuck.
Our office was in a large converted warehouse on the west side of Manhattan. It was somehow determined that there was power on other floors, just not our section. What we needed was a really long extension cord at 2:00 a.m.
Fortunately , my quick thinking wife (now awake and slightly annoyed at the call) said “take the extension cords for the hedge clippers…”, right before she fell back to sleep she also said , “Hon, take the cords, leave the clippers”
I grabbed two extension cords from the garage, jumped in the car , and raced to Manhattan. The normal 1-2 hour commute took about 27 minutes. Traffic is surprisingly light at 2:30 am.
Easy Pass?
I got to the office with 200 feet of bright orange cables. We then snaked the cords down a shaft to an outlet in a hallway on another floor. The number of OSHA, city electrical code, and fire ordinances we violated that morning can be found on page 601 of the Guinness Book of World Records!
I recall my hedge clipper cables running our data collection servers for about a day or so.
We were able to get enough juice to run a couple of the servers and we survived to live another day.
The joys of Internet start-ups!
Don't do this!
Authors note:
Since next Friday is almost Valentines Day, for the Young, or Young at heart, the subject for Volume 2 will be office romances.
