Halloween stories for techies and IT workers from Ars Technica

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/the-devil-had-possessed-his-netbook-and-other-tales-of-it-terror/

It was my first week at my first IT job. A few coworkers got up all of a sudden and quickly started heading for the server room. I asked what was going on, and their response was "there's a fire in the server room, come help!" When we got there, the halon fire suppression system hadn't gone off, and we couldn't smell smoke, so we carefully opened the door to look inside. Nothing. Everything was working fine. In fact, almost the exact opposite happened. After checking the situation out, the main A/C unit had failed, which kicked on the backup A/C unit, which hadn't been tested in months. It had frozen over in the short time it was alive, and when the ice buildup began to melt it flooded the false floor where a smoke detector was, shorted it out, prompting the system to think there was a fire. Interesting first week.

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Our first air-cooled Cray system pulled air from under the floor with a single giant squirrel-cage fan in the bottom of each rack and pushed it up through all the boards and out the top. This of course required installing a couple dozen new Liebert air handlers to push enough cold air under the floor. The raised floor was self-supporting, essentially just a thin metal framework that required most of the tiles to be in place to remain structurally intact. One day we had a COOP exercise and tested the "big red button" on the wall to EPO the facility. The Cray shut off immediately, including all of its fans. The Lieberts were never wired in and did not. We heard the screeching as the fans spun down, mixed with a rumbling as without anywhere for all that air to go it popped out all the floor tiles instead. Then there was the horrible metal crunching as the entire floor collapsed and dropped all the racks.

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Way back in my youth, when dinosaurs ruled the IT industry, I worked at LISP Machine Incorporated. One month we got a batch of power filtering capacitors delivered, in which some of them had been incorrectly labeled with positive and negative grounds. Those suckers could store quite a dollop of electrons in them before they decided to explosively destruct, and for a while it was a fun trick to play on the techs smoke-testing boards to walk up behind them quietly and clap your hands together hard. My, how they would jump! One day I walked into the testing area just in time to hear a loud crack and see a flaming capacitor land at my feet from a machine a good 100’ away.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/the-devil-had-possessed-his-netbook-and-other-tales-of-it-terror/