Muppet Broke The Datacenter Every Day, In Its Own Weighty Way

On Call By Friday the weight of the world presses down upon even the most enthusiastic IT pro, which is why The Register uses the last day of the working week to lighten the load with a new instalment of On Call – the reader-contributed column in which we tell your tales of struggling out from under tech support burdens.

This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as "Harp" and in the 1980s worked for an insurance company that ran an exotic database coded in Fortran.

"The system had a ton of cables, data points and the like running under a raised floor in a sealed, heavily air-conditioned room, with a lead back to the mainframe," Harp explained.

So tangled and elongated was that stuff under the raised floor that the system was known as "Snuffleupagus" – after the Sesame Street character that has fur, a trunk of sorts, no ears, and maybe-kinda looks like a woolly mammoth.

Like his Sesame Street namesake, Snuffleupagus was not very reliable. Most evenings, the system would mysteriously power down.

"That led to complete shutdowns and restarts taking upwards to an hour to recover, reboot and reset," Harp recalled.

Investigations ensued, electricians came and went, and no root cause was found.

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Eventually it became apparent that the problem only happened when a chap named Bob was on duty with four other workers.

Harp checked the logs to see if Bob or anyone else was doing something that crashed the rig – but never found anything amiss.

"I was sitting in a chair trying to figure out what was wrong with Snuffleupagus when Bob got up from his desk, walked across the raised platform, and – Thhzzzp! – the system went down."

Bob, as described by Harp, was "One of those 'larger than life' characters with a low center of gravity, ginger beard, and spectacles."

He was also hefty. So hefty that when he walked across the raised floor – which turned out to have had some panels replaced with extra-thick tiles – his weight meant the floor sagged just enough to press the tops of some metal cable connectors.

"Someone had run phone lines (long unused but still active) in the junction tunnel and over time, they had been smashed so that their wires were exposed to the couplings, creating a short."

Harp lifted the panels, saw the issue, wrapped the wires with electrical tape, and tucked them safely away from the floor tiles. By doing so, he stopped Snuffleupagus from crashing.

"I ran into Bob several years later," Harp told On Call. "He owned his own line of health clubs, had dropped nearly 70kg, and shaved the beard."

If size has mattered enough to create a technical problem you had to fix, click here to send On Call an email and we may tell your tale here on a future Friday. ®