Cleaning the patient off

Unplugging for disaster

In a moment of technical mirth, a colleague suggested a problem on his personal computer on-site had been resolved by the cleaners probably shifting something, cables or dirt came to mind, but it reminded me of the danger of office cleaners and what cost might come with it.

In the late 90’s our data centre housed a number of critical computers but we could not determine why the service had to be restarted in the morning. The server had apparent switched off itself. It was later that we realised cleaners who had gone in to clean the centre after hours needing a socket to plug in their vacuum cleaners yanked a plug out for their device unaware that they had unplugged the server and then plugged it back in after they had finished.

Then, we set aside a socket for the cleaners and put protective tags and notices on the critical power plugs strictly forbidding them to be touched except by authorised personnel.

Cleaning to the heavens

In a short film starring Omar Sharif as a taxi driver taking a young man for a cosmetic procedure, he related a story about a hospital closed for its incidents of unexplained deaths. It then transpired that at night the cleaner went into the Intensive Care Unit and unplugged the life support system for their vacuum cleaner, thereby killing off the patient. However, too many of those incidents had occurred before they found out and it was too late to save the hospital.

Blog - Turn your lights down low, I need to see your liver (Last section – ‘A short story.’

Now, we have all heard it said that cleanliness is next to godliness, what you do not expect is the cleaner dispatching the patient off to God.