Oh My Goff

In my line of work, we often figuratively refer to what we do on a daily basis as “putting out fires”. This last Friday, a couple ladies from the mail room had been reassigned to erase a bunch of old archive tapes using a degausser our company had rented. During the course of the degaussing (which is incredibly loud), it began to smell like burning insulation. The ladies came out of the conference room where their temporary degaussing station had been set up, and informed the small group of IT guys that work in the area that the degausser was smoking, but that it had done this a couple of times and it would be fine once they let it be for a few minutes. I didn’t think this sounded good, but just shrugged it off and went back to work. No less than thirty seconds later, the ladies come quickly out of the conference room and say, “Okay it’s on fire!” My coworker Stacey and I jumped up and made our way toward the conference room. Once inside, I ended up with the ABC fire extinguisher and quickly ran to the other side of the room where the degausser was sitting. While not a huge fire, there were flames large enough that soon the sprinkler system would’ve kicked in, ruining a lot of equipment inside the conference room. I ripped off the safety ring, pulled the pin, and extinguished the flames. While this isn’t a big deal by any stretch, it was still the first time I’ve ever used a fire extinguisher to put out a real fire.

The aftermath?

The source of the fire:

The blessed extinguisher:

A cleaning crew came in yesterday and vacuumed up all the dust that the fire extinguisher had spewed. Somehow I don’t believe there will be any further degaussing in this conference room’s future.

For the last 2.5 years, I have been employed as a Systems Support Tech II at a company called National Flood Services. Last year’s April Fools’ joke was played by just about the entire IT department on an unsuspecting SQA Analyst named Sean. Sadly, the joke went over like a lead balloon and Sean ended up leaving work for the day. Fast forward to about a month ago. While evaluating some thin clients for our VMware VDI project, I suddenly came up with the perfect April Fools’ joke to play on our CIO, Keith. The plan:
-Replace the CIO’s desktop/dual monitor setup with the absolute smallest (but still fully functional) PC possible
-Include a formal official-looking letter from someone higher up the corporate food chain explaining the reason for it
-Place a camcorder in his office to record his reaction and/or fallout
-Do this without being found out beforehand

One of our evaluation units from a company called Pano Logic fit the bill for the tiny PC perfectly. It’s actually a zero client that remotes in to our VMware View connection server and serves up a virtual machine’s display locally. For the display I found a 3″ LCD, meant for car installations, on eBay for under $30 shipped. Unfortunately, it only accepted a composite video input, so I had to purchase a VGA to S-Video>Composite converter as well. A mini keyboard and mouse(also off eBay) ran me another $15 shipped or so.

Photos of the setup at the CIO’s desk:

For the letter, I drafted up something official sounding (while still playful and sarcastic) and printed it out on our parent company’s letterhead. I signed it from the Executive Chairman of StoneRiver, practicing roughly 40 times before I was happy with how it looked. Below is a photo of the finished letter:

I placed my Panasonic HDC-SD600 in a semi-hidden position in his office to catch his reaction. The results?

Keith handled the joke like a champ, even reading the letter aloud to about a dozen IT onlookers who had huddled around to watch the prank unfold.  He was pleasantly surprised to find that the micro PC was not just fully functional, (see pictures above that show our company’s Flood Processing website on the monitor) but fast too! When it was time for his real desktop to come back, he seemed a little disappointed and said that this little PC was actually pretty cool.
The best part was how fun it was getting it all working and put together. Keith’s reaction was the icing on the cake.

Mission accomplished.

Special thanks to Krista, Heidi, Mike, and Sid for their indirect but instrumental help on executing this awesome April Fools’ joke.