Fire! fire!
1. I am working for a customer at an un-named hospital. The IT office is like an ante-room to the server room, visible through a window.

During the morning I see a building services guy coming and going to the server room with a small vacuum cleaner. The room is a bit dusty apparently so they are having a clean up. You are by now way ahead of me.

After lunch the IT team heads off to a meeting, leaving me under the supervision of a lowly tech who whiles away the time playing solitaire.

An hour passes, IT team leader is first to return from meeting and goes straight into the server room, from which he emerges a few seconds later with a face like the proverbial. "Have either of you two been in here?" "No." "The air conditioning is off!" This was confirmed after another few seconds when the heat tsunami rolling out of the server room door hit me. Of course the dust had triggered the smoke detectors which turn off the air con but other than that do nothing (sounding the fire alarm might have been good you'd have thought).

Never mind, both aircon and fire detector control panels are in the IT office. Just a matter of pressing a reset button. But the system had been changed recently (perhaps explaining non sounding of alarm) and the panel was new and there were no instructions. Half an hour later everybody from IT and building services, including management was assembled in the room, scratching their heads and unable to work the panels. Fans were deployed to try and suck the hot air out of the room and non essential servers had been powered down, including mine, so I had the rest of the afternoon off (result!).

I arrived the next day to find that it was late evening before they had managed to get everything switched on again. Except for the couple of external aircon units which had failed to power back up again, never having been switched off before, ever.
The vacuum cleaner bod was banned until the smoke detection problem could be solved - which it was by temporarily taping hospital issue latex gloves over the detectors.

2. We are monitoring equipment at an un-named council and see it disappear off the radar. We phone the customer who advises "we are having problems with false fire alarms, leave it with us". A day later no change and customer calls us: "Can you have a look at our servers, they keep setting the fire alarms off" (which in this server room causes the servers to be shut down). Our engineer toddles off to site. Draws customer's attention to sulfurous haze enveloping the machine room. "Could this be anything to do with it?" he enquires, pointing to the UPS with the fault light (and the gently bubbling acid). "Ahh...". Meanwhile all the manual switching on and automatic switching off of the servers had wrecked half a dozen power supplies and even spreading the redundant ones around left at least one server powerless until spares could be ordered (from a 3rd party support outfit who was rather suspicious of the quantity of simultaneous failures...).
(AgeingGeek Father of Two, Mon 28 Sep 2009, 11:50, Reply)