Toxic building syndrome

Nothing much is happening at the moment, so I thought I would share a little information about the place/building where I work.

From the outside it looks innocent enough, a manure-brown office building with 70s styling. On entering the foyer, the secretary (who has never seen me before) nods smiling as you blatantly pass the sign the demanding that I wear an official identity badge at all times and that I produce it for admittance. My ID badge is at home, but I have never had need of it, despite working on Government high secure solutions. My badge is my face, my face IS my badge.

There are 3 floors inside, each secured with swipe card access. I work on the first floor so have to pass through 2 secure doors. The people who installed the security system must have been Irish though, as an inch above each and every swipe unit is a little red box that says "Emergency door release" and "Break glass and push button". The clue is in the name. So, should anyone called Al Kinda, or indeed anyone nafarious decide to break into the building they will know how to overcome the security.

In reality the main function of these doors is to prevent someone holding a steaming hot cup of tea AND anything else from getting back to work, as they have no free hand to swipe entry.


Now, as Toxic is an IT company as you would expect there are lots of computers here. Unfortunately, as the building was built in the 70s it was not built for this purpose. So, in their wisdom, the managers decided to put ALL the racks of servers on the 1st floor and built a partition around them and put, yes, another swipe card lock on the door.

Now there are just two problems. Firstly, the projects needed so many servers (computers for men with beards) in the one room they exceeded the 2 tonne weight limit of the floor.
Other minor, minor point is that given the building was meant for office staff, the air conditioning, although upgraded a bit, failed during the sweltering summer so they had to resort to opening the windows and powering off the machines that were not being used. Oh, one more thing - if too many servers were switched on at any time the electrical power would trip out meaning everything would start self-shutdown.

(ED: oh look, my manager has just logged on at 4pm on a Monday. How nice of him to attend his computer).

To add to the planning demonstration of excellence, once the floor space was banned from more kit (or even people over 12 stone) they had to resort to putting two more racks of servers downstairs on the ground floor next to the project management team. Then, because they were secure solutions they had a gorilla cage fitted around each one. Shame they did not fit it around the Project Managers, but that is another story.

So, apart from the weight, the lack of cooling and the power issues everything was fine. Thankfully they have now lost both the contracts we were working on so we don't have to worry about those problems any more...