Be Excellent To Each Other

So, I'm stuck. The whole business park's on lockdown and they don't know how long it'll be until they open the roads again.

Cars are queued up in gridlock, it's chaos!

Any news on BBC or anything?
Do you know why they're there?

Apparently they found a suspect package at one of the buildings on our road.

Perhaps it's the two registration documents for my car that DVLA managed to post to a completely different address than mine.

</bitter>

Your hair products in a manbag?

Perhaps it's my last TWO Egg cards that never arrived.

<bitterer>

Weeeeeeeeell, that was an anticlimax. They're letting everyone out now.

It's a pile of rejection letters from people who probably hired a complete cretin because they knew a manager's cousin, and WILL LIVE TO REGRET THIS. In a suspicious bundle.

Most angry non-angry looking person in a video game. Ever.

I thought of that, too. I'm struggling to remember where I saw a comic of that guy followed by a train crashing into a crater, then him again, cackling.

Maybe it was a twat from Plymouth blowing his face off.

I dunno, I go off to Scumdon and on my return the videogames shop over the road has 2 police cars outside and 8 coppers hanging around.

Word from the neighbours is that there was an armed robbery. At an indie computer games shop, 300 yards from a police station on a Tuesday. With a CCTV camera 150 yards away.

Tuesday = not a busy day for computer games shops so they can't have got away with much. Unless they wanted games or consoles. But really. You can only assume it's the same kind of people who nick the cable from the mains supply and then get elecretuted.

[makes note to set man trap in the office when I leave tonight]

I woudl be super happy if they nicked the cases off the shelves not knowing they were empty.

It'll be interesting to know what they were after. If it was money then they have to be idiots striking on a Tuesday during term time. The place is hardly heaving on a day like today. Possibly drug users needing the money? A chancer kid with a knife?

Or something organised? People after consoles? But as a small indie they hardly have lots of stock.

I dunno which I'd prefer. Neither actually. I hope it's just some kid that's gone off the rails who gets caught quickly. It's abit odd something like that happening over the road from here. It's quite frankly not cricket.

My bomb story was better than yours, we had police for at least a month.

I went to an independent game shop once and asked if they could match the play.com price for some game (This was a while ago). They couldn't. nor would they give me any discount, so I bought it from play.com instead and spent the remainder on beer.

I love a story with a happy ending.

Bomb scares are for losers. My office was on FIRE this morning, motherfucker!


Obvoiusly, hanging around inside to take a picture was important.


Burn!

Why, yes I am, thanks for asking.

Hey, we just lynched an innocent man because you were too busy trying not to burn to talk some sense in to us.

_{Are you alright?}

Till we lynch you.

Yeah, touch of smoke 'damage' to my lungs (serves me right), but I'm fine, as was everybody else.

So what happened? Who fucked up?

The safety cut-off on the aircon generator (a fucking great big diesel engine in the basement that powers the aircon) got fed up and decided not to cut off when the generator overheated. Fire and smoke travels fucking fast when it's going through the aircon system.
Me and a chum went into the basement when the fire started to perform an emergency shutdown on the servers (it worked! Wonder of wonders) and drag the two most important ones out (hence the smoke damage) - by then the fire had spread to a nearby corridor which, excellently, held the fire extinguishers. Smoke sucks
No massive damage was done in the end - I'll be back in taking pictures of the aftermath tomorrow.

I was about to post something along the lines of:



Then I realised that yes, yes you would.

Course I would

Ah, Hollywood is right — you do have to travel to the extremities of a building, through fire, to reach the emergency shutdown button.

It's not so much a button (although that is possible, maybe), it's just a command that shuts down all the connected servers as gracefully as possible. Before the handy-dandy fire brigade can come and spray water all over them, obviously.

'Kin 'ell!
That could have been, umm, seriouser.



Wow! What, it's an electrical generator which runs conventional aircon units or does it turn the compressor directly?

Directly. The office is quite big (and very new) and we've been having aircon problems since we moved in. This is the most serious one so far, obv.

You are such a killjoy.



Grim..., yesterday.

Mental. Combined heat and power is fair enough, but I've never heard of a diesel powered aircon in an office block before. Wonder what the rationale for that is.

For some reason I'm imagining Grim... as the fat computer guy in Jurassic Park now.

Dunno - it was cheap, probably.
Thinking about it, I've always assumed it was a direct thing, but maybe it generates power. Quite why the fuck they couldn't get main electricity for that sort of thing is beyond me - it must have been direct.

I'm no expert ( at anything at all, but especially not air con ) but using a diesel engine when you have mains supply seems to be making things difficult for no reason. You'd have to mess with exhaust and air vents and diesel storage tanks.

Although our office buildings air-con seems to be powered by a single hamster on a wheel, so maybe diesel is the way to go.

And maintenance.

It must come down to running cost, and as Grim... says, for that to work out it has to be direct drive, and quite an impressively big system.

There is another, quite well proven way to save on aircon costs though, which is to put a big tank of water in the basement, freeze it at night when electricity is cheap, and use the ice to cool air during the day. Seems less likely to catch on fire too

Are you alright Grim...?