I remember working at an Italian observatory in Switzerland on my BSc thesis project, and the dry air at 3200m altitude caused a lot of static electricity. I was given strict orders to earth myself by grabbing a metal handle on the desk, each time I wanted to type something. Now I had to issue commands to the scope control software every few minutes or so, due to the tracking system being a bit wonky on the 1.5 m aperture infrared scope. I had to keep a guide star centred in a little box I would have to draw on the CRT screen with a whiteboard marker pen before each observation, by issuing short commands to steer the scope up, down, left or right. Even sitting still for a minute or two, you would build up enough static electricity to get a nasty shock. I never blew up a keyboard (which previous astronomers had done) or worse, but it was far from pleasant.

Did you find the chocolate hard to resist?

Or some of those nice pastries with currents?

Too much currents was the cause of the problem.

Static electricity is the result of not enough currents, shirley?

I may have told this one before, but here goes anyway:

Many many moons ago, our physics class was given a somewhat free access to the various items of demonstration hardware and told to pick one, figure out the physics and demonstrate to class.

One classmate picked the static charge generator.

When time came for his demonstration he was in front of the class and proudly turning the handle with one hand, holding on to the metal sphere with the other, and his hair was standing out nicely.

Then suddenly an "eep" was emitted, his eyes rolled up, and he collapsed behind the desk.

When he came to after a while he explained as follows.

1: The desk on which the generator had been operated was a conductive steel desk.

2: He had been wearing boxers that day, and his "fuse" had somehow found it's way out beyond the protective cotton.

3: He was a young man comitted to style, so instead of using a zipper, his jeans were buttoned with a row of nice and conductive brass buttons, agains which his "fuse" had been resting.

4: In order to achieve maximum hair-effect, he had been turning the handle of the apparatus with vigor, resulting in a full body swinging motion that ended with one of the aforementioned brass buttons touching the steel desk, completing the circuit.

Apparently the fuse did not blow completely, but it was a physics demonstration that no one in class was eager to duplicate.

Sounds more like a circuit breaker than a fuse.

Hopefully it was the self-resetting type.

I'm sure the button would pop up again when approriate!

However the UPS failed at that task and instead shut down.

A sentence which seems to apply in over half the cases where a UPS is required to actually do its job

Some of the other couriers might be more reliable though

Our UPS's have been pretty good (even when the mains voltage got up to 255V one day), it's automatic transfer switches that have caused problems for me. One in particular (in a comms rack, just to cause extra problems), that seems to freak out at minor supply changes and rather than switch to a feed from a UPS, just shits the bed.

We have offices in America, where the UPS alarms go off every time it rains or it is very windy...

The alarms on the European servers have only gone off in one location, once, in the last 6 years, apart from the times we've replaced the batteries.

We had an AS/400 at one place I worked. The APC UPS said the batteries were 100% on the weekly self-test. Then we had a power failure and the batteries held for a whopping 2 seconds, before the power dropped completely. All the batteries were dead, but the UPS said they were all healthy and 100% charged! Needless to say, after that the tech in charge of the UPS didn't rely on the self-test and did regular load tests, after putting in a redundant UPS. When the AS/400 came back up, it had lost one of its DASD's, the drive had been running for so long the bearings had dried up and as soon as they cooled down, they seized solid. That was an expensive lesson.

Our little IBM PS/2 Novell Netware server in the corner carried on merrily during this, its UPS didn't have any problems.

If he learnt his lesson, was it a static class?

A long time ago, we used to have crazy office chairs. No matter what type of cloth you wore, any time you unseated yourself, you were loaded with a massive electrical charge.

I swear, it was so painful I got used to grab a key before quitting my chair and approach it to a grounded furniture in order to discharge.

I got some 2 mm flash every time !

I find it's not the clothes that matter, but the shoes. The only times I get shocked is when icy or snowy conditions make me exchange my regular leather soled shoes for boots with synthetic soles.

My father worked for a company that did a lot of the overhead electrical pylons during the 50s and 60s in the UK. When he was an apprentice, one of his first "field" assignments was a downed power cable in a field after it had rained. All the others got out of the van and put on wellies, my father didn't have any and didn't know better... Until he took a step into the field and got blown off his feet! The power was still running through the downed cable!

Sprints cause nothing but trouble

Very good

Aeons ago I worked for an outfit that made, amongst other things, high speed drum printers - 600 pages per minute - onto fanfold paper.

We'd do a test run then lift the stack of printout off the top of the machine, flick the laser line of perforations to start a tear, rip off the stack and take it to Reg, the QA guy, to OK or not.

There was a strip of grounded tinsel at the paper delivery slot, which was supposed to strip any static charge off the paper.

Only on this machine it hadn't been connected.

Mugging here lifted the paper stack, went to give the perforations a flick and received one GODALMIGHTY belt, a bit like being hit in the crook of my arm with a baseball bat.

It's moments like that which confirm the colour of adrenaline is definitely brown.

Few things in a datacentre are as loud as a rack going silent.

We had a line of VAX 11/780s in the mid 80s. A DEC engineer came out to do a memory upgrade on one of them. All the jobs were shifted from the affected machine and it was shutdown (console said it was shutdown and the power could be turned off). The DEC engineer disappeared behind the boxes and threw the power breaker on the wall... And nothing happened, he reappeared and the ops sitting at the console looked at him questioningly. Then the screams started, from the next VAX in the line, the one where all the users and jobs had been pushed from the machine getting the upgrade, he had thrown the wrong breaker!

The very seat I sit on right now causes the monitor in front of me to go black sometimes, just from hopping on it. Sometime i get haptic reminders.

I once had to return a woollen jumper because I kept getting static shocks off it. They gave me a replacement free of charge.

The one I'm wearing right now crackles and pops like it's about explode when I take it off at the end of the day. And there's quite the light show if I take it off in the dark. (Strangely I get no static discharge issues whilst actually wearing it though.)

I have a couple of server rooms that have ethernet thermometers installed, that are set to email all the important people in the business if the temperature exceeds 40 degrees C, the idea being at least one of them can investigate and solve the issue, before the server room melts down.

On 3 occasions now, someone has been working in the server room, myself included, and brushed against the metallic surface of the thermometer, discharging static electricity in to it, resulting in over 20 people receiving an urgent email to tell them the temperature of the server room has reached 3000 degrees.

Many years ago, back in the 8086 days, I managed to fry a multi-io board in a machine simply by releasing the static charge by touching the mouse. The hard drive led went solid red and the machine became unresponsive. New multi-io board required.

Even more years ago, back in the physics class, it was our classroom show-offs turn to have sticky-up hair with his hand on the Van De Graff generator whilst stood on the insulating box. He thought it might be a laugh if he reached out with his finger to touch the teacher but as he leaned forward, his wedding tackle got too close to the gas tap on the bench....

Worked for Sequent in the US back in the day and had a customer with a vertical stack of 6 NUMA-Q compute units.

These were located close to a large UPS and the NUMA-Q system would randomly crash.

We did all we could: monitored the incoming power, replaced boards, memory etc.

Not sure what triggered the eureka moment but after exhausting everything else we focused on what might cause external EMF/EMI interference and with the UPS being so close, it was an obvious candidate.

Now the UPS was a big bigger and its chassis was thick as a brick so no obvious EMF/EMI but right at the bottom was a 2 inch high perforated vent that went all around it with numerous vertical cutouts.

So we setup a monitor and low and behold, at certain times (for reasons not explained but maybe related to the batteries) a large amount of EMF/EMI would blast out.

While the radiation pattern was wide it wasn't very high but it was in the perfect place to corrupt the active memory in the lowest NUMA-Q compute unit and cause the crash.

Solution was simple....more the rack a few feet away and never another issue.

Bluck