Annals of Creative Systems Administration
So, we had this “swamp cooler” that had been used to augment cooling in the machine room for a time. It has been sitting unused since before I started working here a few years ago. It takes up some space, but I could never remove it because it was attached to a hose in the wall, to drain the water.
Well, this morning my colleague complained that the water was starting to smell, so I took it upon myself as the Senior Systems Administrator to solve the problem, once and for all!
We found that the tube actually ran to the sink in the kitchen next to the machine room. I pondered many ways to remove the tube without spilling water in our machine room. Tourniquet? Well, the zip-ties couldn’t compress the hose enough. In the end, I unfastened the hose from under the sink and plugged it with a pen.
From there, it was a straightforward task to pull the tube back through the wall and remove the swamp cooler, freeing us up several cubic feet of valuable machine room!
I was digging around under the sink when a coworker asked “so you’re a plumber now, huh?” I confessed that us systems guys like to think we can do hardware, but really we’re just kind of dangerous, and the right solution would have been to call the facilities people.
I started a set on Flickr to catalog such feats.
