Pilot fish working in university’s IT department reports that a weird network issue is affecting a major research lab on campus. Every Saturday morning around 2:30, one of the core routers, located in the lab, goes dark for about 40 minutes. This 220V beast takes 15 to 20 minutes to fully boot up, and its regular disappearance is a big disruption of network service for about a quarter of the campus, despite the middle-of-the-night timing.

The network guys spend a couple of weeks going through logs but don’t find anything suspicious. So fish decides to be on site at 2 a.m. one Saturday and hang out in the lab just to see what happens. He doesn’t have to wait long. At 2:35 a guy comes in hauling a big floor buffer and heads over to the router’s rack. Fish asks him what he’s doing.

“Well, I need to buff the floor, and this is the only 220V outlet in the room. I should be done in about 20 minutes.”

The next day, locks are installed on the rack doors and a memo goes out to the custodial staff instructing them that no 220V gear is to be used that lab.

Even at 2:00 in the morning, Sharky welcomes your true tales of IT life. Send them to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also subscribe to the Daily Shark Newsletter.