At university, we were able to do an unrelated STEM module in the first year, leading to quite a few issues in the lab. The most entertaining afternoon came from a microbiology practical where someone had somehow never used a Bunsen before. This led to the gas being ignited at the outlet.

When they tried to turn the gas off for the lab, they discovered the fresh new fitted benches had been installed over the shutoff valve for the room (the outburst from the crusty technician was awe inspiring). This led to several frantic minutes of locating a screwdriver and dismantling the bench before the ceiling went from medium to well done.

Gotta admit your punchline was delicious.

Have one on me! --->

A while back when we got a new combi installed, I was chatting to one of the installers. He said that when he was refurbing his kitchen (which was in a rear extension), he took up the flooring, only to find an unexpected manhole cover over an access shaft - with a ladder, no less - leading down some considerable distance into what presumably was some of Thames Water's finest infrastructure. I think he said he covered it up again, with the new floor, and just hopes it is never needed as an access point.

We had an unprotected Big Red Stop Button located right next to the light switch just inside the machine room door. It was second nature to just walk in and hit the lights without even looking.

Amazingly, in the many years I was there, no-one ever tripped the whole room.

Ours was on the wall outside in the general office so you could hit it after escaping a halon dump. Shortly afterwards it had a box put over it with a flap opening.

No, the layers are not too hard to clear. That is a lame excuse. Three minutes with a sledgehammer and I guarantee those layers will be gone, along with that part of the wall.

Then you can redo the wall, the connections and the red button, and you can even put a nice clear plexiglass guard to keep said button from getting inadvertantly pressed again.

Because just painting the layers in red in one spot is not going to solve the problem.

It is not about solving the problem...

It is about the appearance that the problem is solved.

Ah, of course - "high-security facility" and the 1960s vintage screams something related to government/defence, so we're talking civil service in all likelihood.

I suppose we should be grateful that it wasn't the "launch the nukes" button...

It still might... Have you looked for buttons behind the other panels?

Or it was the launch button, but the silo doors were similarly painted over, so the missiles didn't launch, we never heard about it, and we're still here to laugh about it.

Maybe it's a listed building and they were matching the style of the existing decor?

Gotta love the slop dash that some renovations bring... A room is supposed to look 'better' after the renovations. I once lived in an apartment in Chicago, there were so many layers of "emulsion" on the walls that the electrical outlets looked like Pink Floyd's pig pushing through the wall!

And at that point, you have to start wondering, how far down are the lead-paint layers in that emulsion?

During the monotonous hours on the night shift, I can clearly remember some awesome butt-clenching moments when objects thrown across the machine room hit the wall perilously close to the infamous red button.

I know of at least one occasion when the button was hit (apparently an awesome but unexpected shot) that left me recovering systems when I rolled up to start my shift.

Sorry, never happened.

Insurance says no.

As someone else postulated up-thread, this may have been a government facility. Most of these in the UK are self-insured, meaning that if anything goes wrong at a government site the government pays for it.

Of course, this is conjecture. As is the assumption that the decorator at the time cared about insurance at all.

I would postulate that the decorator in question could well have been some manager's son's new painting business. In this case, any shoddy work would have been swept under the rug.

At one SillyConValley startup, I volunteered to replace a bunch of power sockets after an insurance company denied coverage due to inappropriate paint. Took an afternoon, and the guy was nice enough to re-inspect it before going home, so we were allowed to occupy the premises on schedule the next day.

At another company, I was in the glass room when an insurance guy found a drip of paint on the BRB and pulled coverage immediately. Heads rolled over that one.

I may have told this before - apologies to fellow veteran commentards if I have.

Some contractors had been brought in to do some work on the computer room. Their work involved some heavy hammering work. Some of this was quite close to the BRB and duly triggered it off. Cue the familiar sphincter tightening and loosening followed by lots of frenetic running around and shouting till everything had come back to a state resembling normal.

As a side observation, I do wonder if kit in those older days was more tolerant of such unexpected outages compared to now. Where I work now has all its hardware in a dedicated data centre with resilient this that and everything. Would the modern rackmount stuff come back with as little complaint as was experienced in those (not really) halcyon days?

We had a room housing various systems which used to get mysteriously powered off at random times. It turned out that the switch on the ank of sockets was directly in line with the handle on the inside of the door and if you opened it while carying stuff, either by backing against t, or pushing it with your foot the handle hit the switch with just enough force t break the contanct without the switch latching over fully. A strategically positioned door stop eventually fixed the problem.

We have a similar, if much less troubling, switch in our kitchen. Open the refrigerator door, let it swing gently against the wall, and a couple of seconds later, the exhaust fan spins up. The slight pause before it's really making noise greatly enhances the disconnect of cause & effect, and the moment of 'what is that noise now?'