IT Team Laughs as Colleague Holds Power Button to Prevent Outage

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Lie about urgent maintenance relieves colleague stuck holding a power button

The reader, identified as “Bowman,” recalled an incident from the early 2000s involving a Glasgow datacenter filled with floor-mounted servers and external disk arrays.

“I worked in an organization in Glasgow with a datacenter full of them, some with an external disk storage array sitting neatly beside the server.”

The risk was heightened because the servers and arrays looked remarkably similar.

One day, a server needed maintenance, including a hard reboot.

A colleague known as “Vince” was sent to perform the task, which the team expected to take only a few minutes.

When considerably longer passed and Vince did not return, another member of the tech team was sent to check on him.

He soon came back grinning and asked everyone else to come and see what had happened.

“Vince pressed what he thought was the relevant server’s power button but immediately realized it belonged to the storage array sitting next to it,” Bowman told The Register.

Releasing the button would have shut down the array and caused an outage, but nobody else was within earshot. Vince therefore kept his finger on it.

The entire tech team entered the datacenter to witness Vince’s predicament.

“After taking sufficient time to show our support and compassion by pointing and laughing at him, and going to do under arm tickles, we finally asked the boss to take the server down with the excuse of ‘urgent maintenance,’” Bowman wrote. “And that’s how Vince’s finger got some well-earned relief from the pressure it was under!”

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