It just can't get worse

Nowadays the presales people have to do postsales as well, the company will just squeeze every single drop of juice out of you. So I went to install this bloody IBM server for a client with a colleague on Monday. This baby came with a single processor by default, but then the client purchased an additional processor, IBM said we need to upgrade the BIOS in order for the dual processors to work. So we downloaded the files, copied into a disk, and proceeded to upgrade the BIOS.

When the upgrading was running, guess what, the power of the whole damn rack failed and came back after a few seconds. We had connected the power for more than 1 hour and nothing happened, but now it failed when we were upgrading the BIOS. As everybody knows, your server will die horribly if the power fails when you're upgrading the BIOS. As if things were not bad enough, the production server that was also in the same rack was rebooted due to this temporary power failure. Within minutes, bosses started to flock into the server room, questioning the IT staff about the downtime. I could foresee our back will be full with arrows in a short while, time to take cover, so we joined in their discussion and explained that we had done nothing at all, in fact, we suffered the most, as the board of the server will need a replacement from IBM.

Their production server came back up after half an hour. The bosses smiled again and left the server room happily. But now we were in trouble, the baby lied there, motionless, lifeless, dead. Fortunately, IBM tech support promised to assign a field engineer for us. The next day, he came in, replaced the board for us and everything works fine again. The job's done, customer's happy, , the bad luck stops. Kudos to IBM tech support for the fast response.

I hate server rooms. I wish I can avoid them.