Re: posted without comment

From: Vigo Breadcrumbs (vigo_at_breadcrumbbs.com)
Date: 06/09/04 

Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 17:47:13 GMT

JaR <Nunyobidness@softhome.net> wrote in
news:pan.2004.06.09.16.07.54.458822@softhome.net:

> Awwww, c'mon. Tell us another one about the dot-communists!

Awright, dammit, but just so's you'll shaddap.

There was once a Ukranian DBA on staff named Alexi, but I called him
"Dirtclod" because he made the "Peanuts" character of Pigpen look (and
smell) well turned out. We were having one of our daily application-
induced crises with one of our Sybase servers, and I was sitting at the
server room console with the "head" DBA, who was a native-born citizen.
He was tasked with training Dirtclod, as irrational as it seemed, in
handling these types of crises. He decided it would be best to fetch
Dirtclod so he could see how these types of problems got resolved. He
fetched Dirtclod from his desk, who took up a position behind my chair.

You have to understand the server room, though. It was a converted
office, totally unsuited to task. Nosferatu (the company owner, in case
you'd forgotten) paid a semi-drunken air conditioner contractor to
shoehorn a residential-grade air conditioning system into a converted
closet, as he was too cheap to spring for a datacenter-grade unit. An
example of just how big an abortion this was was the fact that the cold-
air vents were in the ceiling, and the hot-air return was down by the
floor.

(The fact that the "server room" wouldn't have even had a lock on the
door unless I'd gone to Home Depot and bought one out of my own fvcking
pocket, I'll leave for another story.)

Anyway, the result of this air conditing insanity was that the room
temperature would swing wildly between about 60 and 90 degrees.
Residential units are designed to run intermittently, and this one
couldn't manage the constant hot-air outflow from the jam-packed server
racks.

When Dirtclod entered the server room, it was near the upside of the
temperature curve, so the funk he emitted in waves quickly polluted the
whole room. Eyes watering, I continued to wrestle with the server
issue. It was then that I heard a window-rattling burst of flatulence
erupt behind me, followed by a decidedly Eastern-European-accented wail
of "ohhhh...my stomach!" Before I could dive for the door, a green-
brown haze descended on the room. The stench was what I imagine would
result from a dead goat being locked in the trunk of a Miami rental car
for a week in August.

I fought down my own retching. The head DBA was curled on the floor
with an attack of the dry heaves. Electrical arcs appeared between the
wall sockets and the server racks, and the servers themselves began
emitting showers of sparks and clouds of thick black smoke. The
building fire alarm sounded, and I heard the distant wail of sirens from
the first station just down the street. I caught a vague image of
figures in bulky haz-mat suits. Just before I lost consciousness, I
heard Dirtclod giggling nervously.

As the Dot Commie's diet consisted entirely of Wendy's super value meals
and Cup-o-Noodles bought in bulk at the nearby Super Wal-Mart, it's a
wonder the whole building wasn't declared a Superfund site. 

-- 
http://www.vigo-alessi.com/images/products/1362.jpg

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