The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe

It's not just machines that need proper HVAC
Who, Me?

The world is rapidly becoming a more uncertain place, but The Register tries to offer readers one small point of certainty by always delivering a fresh Monday morning instalment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your errors and elucidate your escapes.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rob," who told us about the gig he scored as a Sybase developer in the City of London, sometime in the 1990s.

"Three of us were hired into a ' Being John Malkovich ' style situation where we were added to a team that was too busy to explain to us what to do and they also didn't have space for us on their floor of the office," Rob wrote.

Rob and his two new colleagues were given desks on a new floor that had been added to the top of the building and "sat for ages with no one ever taking the time to come upstairs to give us any work to do."
While they waited to work, they shivered – because the new floor wasn't connected to the building's heaters.

A big contributor to the cold was the impromptu data room housing a Tandem mainframe computer.

"There wasn't proper cooling for the Tandem, so they had the window in the data room slightly ajar with one of those fat crinkly air ducts like you have on a portable air conditioner going from the Tandem out the window," Rob explained.

That fat pipe blew warm air from the mainframe out into the world.

Rob and his colleagues coped with the cold as best they could, until the world turned and the weather chilled to the point at which something needed to change.

By then, the trio had observed that the only visitor to the data room was a tech who changed the mainframe's backup tapes.

"We hatched a plan," Rob wrote.

"My colleague distracted the backup guy and I snuck into the data room, pulled the air hose inside, shut the window and snuck out."
"For a few blissful days we were quite snug in our little room, seeing as the window was now closed and the hot air from the Tandem was directed indoors, heating our room," Rob wrote.

"All was fine until the tandem started to give alarms about overheating and an engineer was dispatched from Tandem to diagnose the problem.

At that point our scheme was rumbled."
Has HVAC ever made you hot under the collar, or sent chills down your spine?

If so, blow away your frustrations by sending your story to Who, Me?

We won't let it float away on the breeze!

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