Northridge quake. I was #2 and on call at CRL. That One Guy on dialup in Atlanta playing MUDs 23x7 pages that things are down. I wander out to my computer to dial in and see what’s up, turned on TV walking past it, sat down and turned computer on, as it was booting on comes a live helicopter shot over Northridge showing the 1.5 remaining floors of the 3-story Cable and Wireless building our east coast connector went through.
Took a second to listen and make sure I understood what was happening, changed channels to verify it wasn’t a stunt, logged on and pinged our router there to confirm nothing there, call & wake up Jim: “East coast’s down because earthquake in Northridge and the C&W center fell down.” “....oh.” And then there was the Sidekick outage... -George Sent from my iPhone > On Feb 18, 2021, at 4:37 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <patr...@ianai.net> wrote: > > On Feb 18, 2021, at 6:10 PM, Karl Auer <ka...@biplane.com.au> wrote: >> >> I think it was Macchiavelli who said that one should not ascribe to >> malice anything adequately explained by incompetence… > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor > Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. > > I personally prefer this version from Robert A. Heinlein: > Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. > > And to put it on topic, cover your EPOs > > In 1994, there was a major earthquake near the city of Los Angeles. City hall > had to be evacuated and it would take over a year to reinforce the building > to make it habitable again. My company moved all the systems in the basement > of city hall to a new datacenter a mile or so away. After the install, we > spent more than a week coaxing their ancient (even for 1994) machines back > online, such as a Prime Computer and an AS400 with tons of DASD. Well, tons > of cabinets, certainly less storage than my watch has now. > > I was in the DC going over something with the lady in charge when someone > walked in to ask her something. She said “just a second”. That person took > one step to the side of the door and leaned against the wall - right on an > EPO which had no cover. > > Have you ever heard an entire row of DASD spin down instantly? Or taken 40 > minutes to IPL an AS400? In the middle of the business day? For the second > most populous city in the country? > > Me: Maybe you should get a cover for that? > Her: Good idea. > > Couple weeks later, in the same DC, going over final checklist. A fedex guy > walks in. (To this day, no idea how he got in a supposedly locked DC.) She > says “just a second”, and I get a very strong deja vu feeling. He takes one > step to the side and leans against the wall. > > Me: Did you order that EPO cover? > Her: Nope. > > -- > TTFN, > patrick >
