A little while ago I was sitting at my desk talking with my coworkers when someone walked up to me and asked if I smelled something. This is a little unusual but after thinking for a moment I realized I smelled lots of things. There was one odder that was not something I am used to in the office. It was the distinct smell of something electronic burning. This had happened before in the office and the culprit was typically the ballast going bad in out of the many florescent fixtures that are common place in any office. Why we where roaming around the office sniffing up toward a the said fluorescent fixtures my phone went off and I received an SMS message that a development server had gone offline. I just assumed it was a developer rebooting a dev box and kept trying to find the bad light fixture. I soon got bored sniffing at the lights and decided to investigate the down server. When I looked though the windows into the server room I just could not help noticing the smoke blowing out of one of our servers. This did get me excited as I was getting frustrated that we hat not yet find the damaged light yet. With two mysteries solved we prepared to call Dell support.
Now we have several Dell servers and calling Dell for support is always as much find as poking a needle into your eye. Fist they insist that you need to run their diagnostic tools. I could just see them saying that we turn the server back on to the diag CD. Not sure about anyone else but this seemed like a horrible idea. I decided I would not talk to Dell and delegated it to someone else on the team. What followed was the fasted Dell phone call on record. I only overheard a few of the comments but this was my favorite one:
All I can say is thank god the whole server room did not go up in flames and no one got hurt.
Now the truth may have been embellished a tad but the phone call was only five minutes and we did not have to run the diagnostic CD. The next day a new server showed up and once again we had resolved a problem. I think I need to get firemen hats for everyone one my team at work ??????