Preface: I work in telecom. Over the years though, I’ve cross-trained at some pretty bizarre places. [Data Center] was one of them.

$BT – Me

$HULK – Data center technician that needed to lay off the Wheaties

$DTECH – Data center day shift technician

Moving heavy objects sucks.

Moving heavy objects up stairs sucks even more.

This is why freight elevators were invented.

Sometimes, though, your freight elevator stops working.

Or the building assigns your timeslot to someone else.

Or the union represented elevator operator takes the night off and the thirteen million dollars or so of equipment you paid to have delivered that night can’t go back to the manufacturer, and so you end up having to haul it up eight flights of stairs.

That was the case one fateful evening as I crawled my way through the front entrance of [Data Center].

[The Customer], a large, multinational mega-corporation who loved to make our life miserable by using multiple layers of off-shore employees, contractors, and affiliated workers in order to conduct their business had scheduled a shipment to be delivered that evening, roughly two hours before my shift began.

As [Data Center] didn’t own the building, a request to reserve the freight elevator was made and approved several weeks prior.

The problem arose when the elevator operator called out sick, and thus brought freight travel through the building to a standstill.

Side note:

I’m a union guy, but come the fuck on. You’re seriously telling me that only one man is allowed to operate the elevator, and that if he takes a night off the entire building has to come to a standstill because the union won’t let anyone else, “take his work”?

I wonder about society on occasions like this.

[The Customer] had to scramble. Their delivery contractors were only there to move pallets to the freight elevator and then into the cage, not haul things up eight (plus) stories.

After nearly two hours of haggling on the phone, they finally agreed to call in their backup and hand carry everything up to our floor.

Which means that I arrived just as the spectacle began.

Side note 2:

I know what you’re going to say:

“Why didn’t they just use the regular elevator?”

They would have, if the building allowed it, but the building management team was ardently against any freight being moved through the lobby (and by extension the main elevator). So that idea was quickly shot down.

$HULK - $BT, you made it.

$BT – Still. Not. Functional.

$HULK – BRO! You see all the shit they have to carry?

$BT - …

$HULK – Yeah, dude. They have fifteen pallets of stuff they have to unload and hand carry all the way up here.

$BT - …

$HULK – $DTECH is following them up and down to badge them into our floor.

Side note 3:

For security, each floor could only be badged into by an occupant from that floor. It was up to [Technician] to badge the moving team into and out of each floor as they hauled their stuff up.

I had finally finished my third cup of joe, and the gears in my brain were starting to clear off twelve hours of cobwebs.

$BT – Who’s doing it from our shift, do you know?

$HULK – Well, $DTECH agreed to work OT for a few hours until you guys got caught up on your regular work, and then it’s up to you guys to sort it out amongst yourselves.

$BT – Cool, bro.

By now we had ended up in the operations center, and the nightly brief had begun. Day shift had accomplished their tasks and despite the hold up with the elevators, things had gone smoothly. The moving men weren’t happy about having to move everything up and down the stairs, but they were doing it, and we were to assist if at all possible.

After an hour or so of uneventful night labor, a call came in over the radio.

$DTECH – Uh…$BT, can you come assist with something.

$BT – Copy. What’s your location?

$DTECH – The stairwell between sixth and seventh.

Weird, there’s not much in that stairwell.

$BT – Okay. I’ll be there in a minute.

I hit the stairwell, badged through, and headed down.

At the spot between the sixth and seventh floors there stood a shocked group of moving men, $DTECH, and no equipment.

$BT – What’s up?

$DTECH – They dropped it.

$BT – Dropped what?

$DTECH – A [BRAND] chassis.

I looked around, not seeing anything.

$BT – Where did they drop it, dude? I’m not seeing anything.

$DTECH looked at me, wide-eyed and panicking, and pointed.

$DTECH – There.

I turned and looked.

Fuck. Me.

To be continued.

Edit: Part 2 is put, if anyone wants to read it.

Edit 2: Part 3 is also out.