3 ms·
Tangentially related, in the early 00’s in a datacenter belonging to a large multinational corporation, there was an IBM as/400 that frequently leaked puddles o
by electric_mayhem 5y ago
Tangentially related, in the early 00’s in a datacenter belonging to a large multinational corporation, there was an IBM as/400 that frequently leaked puddles of yellow liquid.
A puddle was found under it; the puddle was cleaned up. The puddle came back. Repeatedly.
The data center management was perplexed. The internal as/400 professionals were stumped. IBM techs were called in. They assured the datacenter’s management that this couldn’t be coming from the hardware. The machines simply didn’t contain yellow fluid.
No leaks in the ceiling, no overhead pipes, it wasn’t coming from the chassis, no other hardware exhibited this weirdness. Food and drink had never been permitted inside. But it was coming from somewhere, because no matter how many times they cleaned it up, another puddle appeared.
When finally a camera was surreptitiously deployed to surveil the afflicted machine, it didn’t take long before the camera revealed one of the datacenter staff members was just walking up to it and urinating on it. No particular reason, just something he felt like doing.
- whalesalad 5y agoDunno how anyone could be perplexed ... piss smells like piss.
- BoorishBears 5y agoPiss smells like urea, and urea has industrial uses. If you have 0 ideas about what it is, and piss seems improbable, I could see the confusion
- eutectic 5y agoUrea doesn't smell like anything much. Leave it long enough and it breaks down to make ammonia, which does.
- BoorishBears 5y agoYou mean like leave it under a hot mainframe? Or expose it to warm temps in a lot of industrial processes? It's a distinction without meaning, urea based products like DEF end up smelling like pee/ammonia. Laypeople usually specifically compare it to a cow urine smell
- vixen99 5y agoMost people can't taste it at all. And let's celebrate its 'invention' by the mammals so many million years ago as a brilliant solution to the problem of how to temporarily store and then excrete nitrogen in a harmless way as against the uric acid route used by birds and reptiles. People who have a test for the nasty H. pylori bug swallow a solution of urea and find it tasteless as far as I'm aware.
- fnord77 5y agonobody sniffed it?
- throwaway41597 5y agoIf it was in a datacenter, maybe the ventilation was too hard...
- an_ko 5y agoIn industrial settings, sniffing unidentified mystery fluids may lead to a very bad time.
- londons_explore 5y agoI bet the IBM workers sniffed it, but then decided they couldn't write in the report "stop pissing on our servers and blaming us!". So instead they wrote "the servers don't contain any matching yellow liquids. We recommend using a camera to identify the source of the leak".