Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station
- Reference: 1718609292
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/06/17/who_me/
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This week, our hero is "Peter" who worked as "a civilian bod for the local constabulary." In other words, he was helping install computer kit at various police stations. And he was inspired to send in his tale by our recent stories of non-IT tools being employed in IT ways.
Peter’s tale took place in the time before wide-area networking was widespread, At the time, each police station therefore had its own server, plus other necessary kit, all set up in whatever room had some space.
[1]
Datacenters these rooms were not. Even server rooms could sneer at these facilities.
[2]
[3]
Setting up one such rudimentary facility in a converted old house out in a rural area, Peter had someone measure up the room, the hallway leading to it, and of course the door into the room. Satisfied the numbers looked sound, he ordered a rack full of gear and waited for it to be delivered before going on-site to plug it all together.
The measurements turned out to be very exact indeed, with little margin for error. Indeed the hallway leading to the designated "server" room was barely large enough to let the rack through.
[4]
Then they reached the door. Peter described his next move as "an exercise in multidimensional geometry" as rotated the rack into position to be shifted into the door – only to discover that the doorway was not quite wide enough.
[5]Seething CEO shoulder surfed techie after mistaken takedown of production server
[6]Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not
[7]A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?
[8]Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job
Removing the door and hinges created enough space to poke some of the rack through the gap, but evidently whoever did the measurements had neglected to consider the height.
The hallway was too narrow to tilt the rack sufficiently to allow it to go through sideways, so it had to go upright. Removing anything removable from the rack still left a solid metal frame that was irreducibly too large to get through the space available.
So Peter came up with a plan that involved a trip to a nearby hardware store to acquire a hammer, chisel, and nails. With those tools to hand he set about dismantling the wooden "stop" at the top of the door frame, creating enough clearance to get the rack through – by millimeters.
Then, of course, he put the doorway back together again.
[9]
Once that was done, there was the small matter of who was going to pay for the tools that had been purchased. Quite logically, the boss could not see why an IT team required a hammer and chisel. Nor could he understand why the department should buy a civilian contractor a bunch of woodworking tools.
Eventually, it was agreed the police would pay for the tools, but they would belong to the department. So there they remained: the hammer on display with a sign designating it the "user attitude readjustment tool."
If you've found a novel use for a tool – whether meant for computer use or not – we'd really like to hear about it. [10]Click here to send an email to Who, Me? and we may immortalize your tale on some future Monday. The mailbag's getting a tad sparse, so we could really use some stories. ®
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Re: User attitude readjustment tool
With it's sister tools, the "percussive maintenance device", the "gentle persuasion device" and the "clue-by-four"...
The first two being increasingly large hammers, and the latter either a length of wood or a baseball bat (nail optional).
"attitude readjustment tool"
Hammer, Nails and Chisel.
Like Arthur Piranha's son Dinsdale nail user to floor, readjust physiognomy with hammer and chisel and like Mary's little lambs, user's attitude is sure to follow.
I think I might avoid that shire (along with Midsomershire. ;)
"user attitude readjustment tool"
Also useful in [1]retrophrenology .
Doffs hat to the late, great sir Terry Pratchett
Mine's the one with Men At Arms in the pocket
[1] https://wiki.lspace.org/Retrophrenology
Yep, been there
Including pre-installed servers and storage in rack adding up to 1 metric ton, being too heavy for the lift/elevator. On another occasion the machine room floor was strong enough but the ramp wasn't. At another site the rack was too tall for the lift and had to be tilted right over.
Re: Yep, been there
Our shiny new office was built with super mega 8ft tall doors everywhere. Except the machine room, where they were normal height, and we bought 7ft racks.
They went through the door OK at an angle, it was just super annoying that IT was treated badly by artichokes ('tects) yet again.
And I thought I had trouble getting my computer desk (an ancient mahogany beast that probably belonged to a lawyer before it got to the British Heart Foundation) through the front door of this Victorian workman's cottage.
I won't lie, the speed with which the delivery guys got my front door off it's hinges was impressive. Faster than I could google how to remove a door, it was off.
If "Pete" is a contractor why fight about the cost of a hammer and chisel? IR35 & all that.
Could have been worse
> the hammer on display with a sign designating it the "user attitude readjustment tool."
It might have been a nutcracker
Re: Could have been worse
How about Haptic User Readjustment Tool.
Just saying like...
Re: Could have been worse
Brilliant
Re: Could have been worse
or .... The Happy User Device!
The Shrinking Site
A number of years ago we moved our first equipment into a new site while the surrounding facilities were still being built. At the time, it had nice spacious hallways we could run our racks and equipment through, so the initial installation was definitely not a problem. A couple of months down the road, however, we needed to replace a faulty Cisco GSR 12012 chassis[0] - something about the (passive) backplane deforming due to not enough support from the metal frame(?).
In any case, for some reason, the builders had placed a three-step stair about a meter inside a doorway[1] with no ramp. Also, they'd raised the floor so much AND installed a false ceiling to boot, meaning that we had to tip the chassis on its back on the trolley with one person pulling and two people bracing against the top for it to fit through the now quite claustrophobic space as there was no longer space to move it upright. There was JUST enough space to get it through the door and into our suite[2], where we could finally stand it up the right way again.
And I've mentioned my favourite not-quite-a-tool from the same era earlier here; it was a slightly deformed metal teaspoon that we kept on top of one of the racks at another site (the one we were aiming to replace by this new site, in fact). It perfectly fit the screw heads on the GSR line cards and came in handy many a time.
[0] Hefty boxes, somewhere just north of 30 RU if my memory serves me.
[1] The kind of door you can't leave open for more than 22 seconds before you have alarms blaring and guards coming to see what you're doing.
[2] We may or may not have accidentally invented a new area of physics along the way - we certainly invented some new colourful vocabulary, that's for sure
The kind of door you can't leave open for more than 22 seconds before you have alarms blaring and guards coming to see what you're doing.
We had doors like that in our office. It's amazing what a strategically placed whiteboard magnet and some blu-tack can do.
Doors
We were supplying a control panel into the base of a new water-tower out in the middle of nowhere and our contractor was supposed to off-load and install it within the building. They off-loaded it somehow, very, very early one morning, before we arrived, by sliding it onto some pallets topped with scaffold boards. They left, having no intention to complete the transfer into the building, reneging on the contract and demanding an extra charge. Their thinking was that we would have to pay, whatever the cost. Time mattered and we would be heavily penalised for a delay in completion.
The tower had been built with the 'machinery-access' doors at the back and a 'pedestrian access' at the front. You can guess where the 4000x600x1900 (l,w,h) panel had been left and there was no way we could take it round to the large doors without lifting machinery.
Careful measurements showed that the panel might just fit through the doorway on rollers made from steel conduit tubing. With ropes, rollers, wedges and levers and a nod to the constructors of Stonehenge (which was not a million miles away), together with the customer's consultant (who was sympathetic to our cause, it affected his payment too), we manoeuvred the panel into the tower without damage to the panel or doorway. The concrete floor still bears track-marks where rollers were edged round. Reward ----->
The contractor who let us down never found out what happened and we deducted fair value from their invoice. They never got another order from us.
"stories of non-IT tools being employed in IT ways"
Depends on the value of $TOOL, as I encounter many, many 'tools'... many of them in HR, managements, change control.
I'm not sure if using one of those tools to test the continuity of a 240V 30A AC feed would be considered an IT use of a non-IT tool
On reflection, its a perfetctly valid use.
Rubber Mallet
Back in the 1970's, when TVs still have thermionic valves, I supplemented my student grant (yes, grant, not loan back then) by weekend work in a local TV shop selling, delivering and repairing. Everyone chipped in with whatever needed to be done, even the shop owner. His usual approach to a TV brought in with an intermittent fault was to turn it on and then "tap" it with a small hammer. It was a good test to reveal if the problem was associated with a valve, but it sometimes made his "chipping in" too literal and left us with additional work on the cabinets. So we bought him a rubber mallet - it saved us a lot of time and wood filler, varnish and polish...
The delivery part of the job could also be challenging, especially hauling a 1970's colour TV up a dozen flights of stairs (the higher the floor you had to deliver to, the greater the probability the lift was broken - and the even greater likelihood you were delivering on your own)!
I worked for a race car manufacturer. One of our Dell servers underwent unscheduled altitude change and unapproved chassis reconfiguration. The bits and bytes inside seemed OK, but it wouldn't go back in the rack.
The shop floor lads thought it hilarious when we went to borrow their user adjustment tool and a bench to pound against.
User attitude readjustment tool
Usually abbreviated to "LART".