Recap: Someone made a 400lb chassis disappear in the stairwell of a secure facility.

$BT – Me

$DTECH – Data center day shift technician

$OPM – Operations Manager for the site

Part 1

When the last part of our story ended, $DTECH had called me to the stairwell to report that a chassis had gone missing.

$BT – That’s not funny, dude.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The door was wide open.

$DTECH – No, seriously it’s down there.

The emphasis on, “there,” was unnerving as he pointed to where it had gone.

$BT – Walk me through exactly what happened, one more time.

$DTECH – Alright. So they were coming up the stairs with one of the new [BRAND] chassis.

$BT – Okay…

$DTECH – And he slipped.

At this he pointed to one of the movers, still standing and frozen with panic.

$BT – He slipped.

$DTECH – Right. And so to catch himself, he grabbed a hold of the door handle.

$BT - …

$DTECH – Which made the door swing inward.

$BT – No.

Fuck.

$DTECH – Yeah, and so that he didn’t fall, he dropped the load and it bounced into the shaft.

$BT – I don’t even.

I should explain.

The building we were in was ancient. It was previously built by [COMPANY] for [VOCATION] work. The floors are all reinforced concrete so it stood to reason that it could handle the weight of loaded racks and cabinets.

In this building, there was a large maintenance shaft that ran alongside the stairwell. That shaft had doors entering it from each midway point between floors. The doors were always supposed to stay locked, as in-house urban legend told that someone had fallen down the shaft, years ago, while searching for a janitor’s closet.

Needless to say, there was now a very, very expensive chassis at the bottom of the maintenance shaft.

And I had my doubts as to whether or not it would be recoverable.

I just sort of stood there for a few moments, perplexed as to what to say. The moving guys looked at me like I was supposed to sort this out.

I slowly backed away.

$BT - $DTECH, you and the movers should finish getting the rest of the stuff into [The Company’s] cage, then you need to talk to $OPM to see what he wants to do when the customer gets here, and file an incident report with the movers and our front line (phone) support.

I was sweating bullets.

That chassis cost more than my annual salary, and $OPM was notorious for handing out lashings to anyone within close proximity of a fuck up. And I only had a few hours before the customer arrived on site to find his quarter million dollar pile of scrap in our basement.

Guess I should just let it ride. After all, I didn’t drop it.

Right?

After another two hours had passed, $DTECH was back in operations.

$DTECH – Alright, everything’s moved. I’m out.

$BT – Whoa, hold on there partner.

$DTECH – Hey, man. I’m going home.

$BT – Did you call $OPM?

$DTECH – No. I thought you were going to do it.

$BT – The fuck you did. I wasn’t babysitting the movers.

$DTECH – And?

$BT – Did you file the incident reports, at least?

$DTECH – Nah, man. I’m not signing my own death warrant.

Is this guy for real?

$BT – Dude, you were there. You saw it. Fill one out so we have documentation to show the customer and to bill against the movers.

$DTECH – Forget it man, I’m out.

And with that, he scurried out the door

Forget bullets, I was pissed. We weren’t about to eat shit for this mess. The three of us on my team who were there that night, just sort of looked at each other, wondering what to do next.

The way we saw it, we had two options:

Option A – Call $OPM tell him what happened. We eat shit for being the ones who reported it, throw $DTECH under the bus for being a douche, and hope to god the customer doesn’t eat us alive.

Option B – Say nothing. Let the customer trip balls from not having any information regarding the location of his chassis and then let $DTECH take the heat when the truth came out. While cathartic, this option would have looked the worst on the company.

So we did the right thing:

We went with Option C.

$OPM – This had better be good. It’s late.

$BT – Funny thing about that, sir…

To be continued.

Edit: Part 3 will come out in the morning. is up! Sorry about the delay.