When departments don’t trust their IT team, systems tend to fall apart.

One HR department was so suspicious that they kept their data server locked away in their own office, far from the data center.

When things finally went wrong, the setup proved just how fragile paranoia can be.

Keep reading for the full story!

When the Space Heater Took Out HR

This tale is from the mid-90s.

I was a CNE (Certified NetWare Engineer). This was my second job since gaining the certification; the first was working as a field tech.

This company had three NetWare 3.x servers located in the data center and one server located in HR.

HR was… distrustful.

And by that, I mean in their office.

Why was that server there? Because they were concerned that the nefarious IT people would spy on their stuff.

This company was one of the accounts from my previous jobs, and thus I was familiar with the layout.

IT knew this wasn’t the most elegant solution, but their hands were pretty tied.

But it was not until I was hired that I mentioned to my boss that perhaps the HR server should be in the data center. You know, backups and things.

The boss agreed, but he was unable to force the issue.

That is, until things started going wrong.

One day at work, I got a call from our help desk that the HR server was down hard.

I investigated, and it seemed that a young woman working for HR decided to plug a space heater into the power strip that ran the server.

Yes, I know.

The server now needed a lot of work.

Well, NetWare 3.x is pretty bulletproof, but sadly the hardware was not.

We needed to repair the server, reinstall the OS, and get the backup from HR—which, of course, was located at the HR manager’s home.

Who was out. On vacation.

Eventually everything went back to the way it was.

Two days later, the backup tapes were delivered, and I restored data up to the previous weekend.

And I’m happy to say that HR learned their lesson and moved their server to the data center.

Nah, just kidding.

The server stayed where it was.

Some people never learn.

Redditors are sure to have some strong reactions.

This story had quite the realistic ending.

There’s a reason IT is a specialized profession.

HR isn’t even close to scratching the surface of how this works.

The consequences here were both predictable and preventable.

Taken out by a space heater! How sad.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.