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Cleaning ladies

Beatnik on 2007-04-30T12:12:59

One of those urban myths is about cleaning ladies. You all heard the stories about how cleaning ladies pull out plugs in hospitals and server rooms, right? I have a story of my own to tell now. We have a cleaning lady that cleans the operations center twice a week, usually during office hours. This morning, right in the middle of work, she shows up (nothing wrong there). She decides to clean the desks (rearranging all my sticky notes. GRRRR) and clean the floor. After she finishes, my connection dropped. Horror stories begin to flash before my eyes. What has she done?? Oh my god! What has she done. It turns out, she accidentally cleaned a shelf where a small-ish media converter was sitting. The media converter was now hanging below the shelf, stretching all of the cables. Most of the cables have a way to prevent accidental disconnects... all but the power cable. Power connected equals connection back on.

What do you mean "myth"?

duff on 2007-04-30T13:39:12

I think that there is some well documented evidence that cleaning crews and the like have done things that cause IT people headaches. For instance, at the university where I used to work, we had problems with one particular network connection that turned out to be because a maintenance crew used our fiber to tie up some other cables and get them out of the way. Knots and fiber don't play well together. :-)

I'd be willing to bet that anyone who has been in the business longer than 10 years or so has first hand experience with such stories. They aren't so common now because ordinary people are more educated about networking and computers and such or they just aren't allowed in places where they could cause damage so much anymore.

Hmm cleaning crews

grantm on 2007-05-01T00:36:59

Years ago, I had a long running intermittent fault with a protocol converter box for hooking up a line printer to an IBM mainframe. It turned out that the cleaning staff were unplugging the box to plug their vaccuum cleaner in and then putting it back in when they were finished. They were not deterred by the large "DO NOT UNPLUG" label since they couldn't really read english.