Static Electricity Can Be Shockingly Funny, But The Jokes Over When A Rack Goes Dark

Who, Me? Returning to work on Monday often imparts a rude shock, which is why The Register opens the week with a new instalment of Who, Me? It’s the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your worst moments at work and explain how you survived them.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Connor,” who told us about a job he held in his early 20s when his desk and the hardware he worked on were separated by six storeys.

As he was young and fit at the time, when Connor was summoned to fix something he would often run up or down the stairs.

Doing so was made fun by the fact that conditions in the stairwell meant some runs produced a static charge in Connor's body.

"If I touched metal railings or people it was sometimes quite funny," he told Who, Me?

One fine day Connor realized he'd forgotten to cycle some backup tapes, so bounded downstairs and upon arrival leaned his hand against a rack full of switches.

He quickly felt the expected pinch of static discharge.

Next came a far more severe shock: Every LED on every switch in the rack changed from green, to orange, to black.

"I think I went pale at the time and my heart may have stopped," he told Who, Me?

Connor was jolted out of that stunned state when the server room phone rang.

"It was my boss asking what I had done, as the helpdesk phones were hopping and every single user in the office had lost connectivity to everything."

Connor gathered his wits and noticed that a nearby uninterruptible power supply (UPS) was, oddly, turned off. Once he turned it on, the switches all came to life in about ten minutes.

"I have never sweated so much in a room that cold," he told Who, Me?

• Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after
• Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own
• After three weeks of night shifts, very tired techie broke the UK’s phone network
• Developer wrote a critical app and forgot where it ran – until it stopped running

He later checked some logs and deduced that when his personal electric charge hit the rack, the UPS there detected the kind of power surge it was designed to protect against by providing clean power from its batteries. However the UPS failed at that task and instead shut down.

Connor left us with some lessons he's picked up during his career:

• Don't make any changes on a Friday;
• Always double check a script before you run it (and run it on a test machine first);
• Don't ever assume making an upgrade will be harder than applying a patch.

Has static electricity ruined your day? If so, find your keys and touch them gently, then click here to send an email to Who, Me? so we can shock Reg readers with your story on a future Monday. ®