Apartment Dweller Woes

This memory was dredged up by https://www.aboveaverage.com/watch/above-average-presents/everyones-upstairs-neighbors/

One day I was sitting in my 2nd-floor apartment in a multi-family home. I was the meat of the apartment sandwich: a family below me, and a family above me. The house was owned by our very good friend Val Scott Barker.

One Saturday afternoon I was quietly reading at home when a tremendous crash echoed from upstairs. I, like so many apartment dwellers before me, stood under the source of the sound for a long moment and wondered just what exactly happened up there.

My wonder only increased when several minutes later the ceiling fan in the middle of the room started dripping a whitish fluid. Inspection was inconclusive because it was tinged reddish-brown. Had they killed someone with a can of white paint up there? The lamp had a steady stream for a short while, and dripped for almost an hour; I caught it in a small cup. Upon further inspection it appeared to be milk that had picked up dirt from between the floors.

Several days later the mystery was put to bed when I talked to one of the occupants. Their toddler wanted something on a high shelf in the fridge, and had pulled an entire shelf out — one that included a full gallon of milk. Most of the milk disappeared into the hardwood floor before she could clean it up.

We moved out a couple of years later, into a house of our own. Bill and Laura had created a second small adorable child, but they never topped the milk pouring out of the ceiling while I was there.

Offshoring Gone Wrong

Here’s a tale of offshoring gone wrong.  This doesn’t qualify as horribly wrong, nor a disaster, but only because very little money was on the line.

I used to work for a small software company with a well-known product that has a long pedigree (it shall remain nameless, but our major competitor was WinRar).  I actually miss working there —  well, I miss most of it, but I did leave voluntarily.  That’s a story for another time.

We had started translating our primary product into many languages, and we wanted to provide localized translations of our website as well.  In order to save some cash, management decided that we would outsource and offshore the translation of our company website.  Our new president knew of the perfect company to hire, too.

My boss — the VP — and the rest of the engineering and IT team were all a little nervous about dealing with this new company, not only because we didn’t have a great way to verify the work but also because we didn’t have a good relationship with the new president. (Distrust isn’t strong enough a word, but it describes it well enough for this story.)  The first couple of sub-projects came back and looked ok, though, so we started to think we were over-worrying the problem.

Our process was to scrape our own english site, determine which pages and what snippets we would translate, and send those items as plain-text to the translators.  After a couple of days we would start getting the translated documents back and we would build the site.

We had a few bumps along the way, such as getting plain-text documents with an unspecified code-page — we had asked for, but didn’t initially get, UTF-8, but we eventually had them send us the documents in Word to remove character-translation problems — but the process seemed to be working overall.  We ran the the translated documents through Google Translate to make sure the reverse translation (back to English) looked ok, and it did.  In retrospect, it was a little too perfect.

So, fast forward a couple of weeks, we get the third or fourth package back. My boss noticed something… odd on one of the pages. It was worth calling the rest of the team into the office to check it out, stat!

If you guessed that it was an artifact from Google Translate’s page – just a straight copy and paste from browser to Word document that picked up a little too much – you’d be correct.  Cue immediate back-pedalling from the vendor that “it was just that one document” and “the other translations were done by hand” and by native speakers.  Haha, not so much.


Author’s Note: Though this post may seem, at first glance, to be a warning against offshoring, it’s really a warning about hiring executives with too-cozy relationships with vendors.  I’ve seen offshore projects go well and go sour, but the nepotism I saw with the above-mentioned new company president were almost always followed by a bitter taste in our mouths.

The Troublesome Broadcast Message

Back in the good-ole days of Windows NT (circa 1998) I was a member of IT support at a large multi-national corporation.  The campus I worked for was about five thousand people large.

Background: Windows 98/98/NT 4.0 had a neat little utility to send pop-up messages to specific machines.  It was a front end to the net send built-in command, and messages would appear almost instantaneously on the recipient’s machine in nice little window.  (Similar functionality still exists in more recent versions of Windows, but the messenger service no longer starts by default.)

So, one slow day a bunch of us were shooting the shit and getting a little rowdy.  I think there were some flying objects and maybe a nerf gun involved.  One of the upper-level techs, who shall remain unnamed, fired off a message to someone else: “John, look out behind you”.

Only, he didn’t get the machine name right.  He broadcast it to the entire campus.  5000+ machines.

A lesser-known feature of the net send command, and therefore of the messenger utility, was the ability to message an entire workgroup or domain.  To do so, you only need to specify the workgroup or domain name in the recipient box.  And that’s what he did – he intended John’s machine name but the domain was the default in the box — and he forgot to change it.

Hoo boy, that was some trouble, and being a political organization it nearly took the form of someone’s-getting-fired-type trouble.  It took the ‘lizard king’ email storm to finally let it die down completely.  I’ll save that story for another day, when I dig the entire email chain out of archives and obfuscate some details.

The Mysterious Crashing Network

This is a second-hand story, so take it with a grain of salt. My first tech job was for a local computer shop owned by a guy who’d been around a bit. This is his story, from before I knew him, with some added flourishes:

A call came in on a Friday afternoon, around 2 pm, from one of the larger customers with a support contract: the network is down, nobody can get to the fileserver. We’re dead in the water, you have to come out.

Andy makes haste to arrive on-site, but it takes a while due to starting on the other end of town. As he’s arriving, the network has miraculously recovered.

These things shouldn’t just solve themselves, but then again they shouldn’t randomly happen, either (but this is back when hardware was touchier than it is now). Everything checks out now, nothing looks amiss – the netware server is running like nothing happened and everyone has file access again. Chalk it up to solar activity or something.

Next Friday afternoon, 2 pm: same call, same problem. And as Andy arrives, the network is coming back to life. Check again, netware indicates no downtime. Clearly something happened, and un-happened before anyone could try to fix it.

This happens a couple of more times, and the Andy decides that this calls for a pre-emptive strike. He clears his calendar on Friday afternoon and shows up at the client’s site just after lunch. He’s going to wait it out.

Now, this is in the days of Netware, IPX, and 10-base2 cabling: one long common circuit of coax cable to join everyone, running at a staggering 10 megabits. Netware is pretty solid but 10-base2 is touchy: the cable must be unbroken and terminated at both ends, or else it doesn’t work. It’s slow because of all the cross-talk but nobody complains because it’s cheap to install and files are still relatively small. Nobody has email and the internet is unheard of.

Precisely 2:05 pm, on schedule, the network goes out. The office is small enough that he can see everyone, and confirm that there isn’t someone doing something nefarious. Just people going about their business – working on documents, having meetings, neatening up the office before the weekend, watering their plants…

It turns out there was a stress fracture in the cable’s sheathing. It wasn’t causing a problem most of the time. But this crack happened to be behind a secretary’s desk, under her new plant.

Every Friday she would overwater that plant, causing the excess to overflow down the back of her desk and over the cracked sheathing, effectively un-terminating the network.

After an hour or so it would dry and things went back to normal.

I originally posted this on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2p6qy5/4_impossible_bugs_any_other_stories_like_these/cmu7hte and realized that it really belongs here.  Andy, if you read this, you still owe me some paychecks!