I got this story from a comment on El Reg (the Register) a while back – whilst the dude what posted the comment didn’t divulge any full details I’ve worked in IT in various small and large organisations and it all seems perfectly possible.
He was a white British guy working with another chap who was British Asian and a Muslim, and they had a task to tidy up a great rats nest of cables in server/comms room (loads of patch cables all knotted together, along with mains / British Telecom and fuck knows what else such as random extra switches, modems etc connected to them) – and also to mark important ones at each end.
The two of them picked a Friday afternoon to do this, as British offices are often more quiet then. For the Muslim guy praying at the correct time is very important, but so is showing loyalty and dedication to an employer (irrespective of their race/faith) who treats them well. A dilemma for him was the time chosen to do this work clashed with the important Friday afternoon prayer time
Also if two people try and untangle long cables and identify them at the same time, this can result in the cables getting further tangled or worse misidentified at each end (like BT Openreach regularly do with telephone lines).
So the white guy agreed that the Muslim guy should bring his prayer mat into the comms room, and start his prayer, and by that time all the cables will have been untangled and both can start on getting the network back up – which is both sensible and respects peoples diversity etc – plus a Muslim IT chap is almost certain to have some kind of clever gadget which can show which direction Mecca is even in a windowless comms room (even before smartphones a normal wristwatch with hands can be used for this purpose) – or would have noted it using a building plan.
Unfortunately for them a senior manager had picked the same time to try and copy large files across the network (having ignored the email usually sent warning users of the planned service, probably in the same IT department as well) – when first his desktop stopped working and then all the servers, decided to visit the comms room and find out WTF was going on there.
On opening the door he saw one chap looking like this (on Fridays many who don’t normally wear full Islamic gear often do so) repeating الله أَكْبَر ( “Allahu-akbar”)
The other guy up was to his arms in a great number of tangled cables (they had only just started the work)
various warning alarms and lamps were going off everywhere (most decent telecoms kit warns you if a circuit is disconnected). Plus the comms room was in semi darkness and they were working with hand lamps and emergency battery lamps
as another sensible precaution they’d turned off the mains for safety until all the cables had been checked – this shows up bodges like network kit powered off the 6A lighting circuit and hid up in ceilings (should have its own 16A feed from same place as comms room and appropriately labelled) also in a place with UPS units this also shows up any rogue power feeds that should have been on the UPS but aren’t. With mains off most UPS units make a great racket – but its better to put up with this until its certain that servers etc are shut down correctly – the button to quiet the UPS is always in a awkward place and often same one what shuts down the outputs if pressed too long – hard shutdowns can completely hose HDDs on linux servers bit (found that one out myself the hard way 😥
Anyway the combined effect of this scene on the manager was that he quickly exited very sheepishly and looking genuinely shit scared, with the words “I guess the network will be down for a while then, and I’d better leave you two to it..” (once the cables had been sorted the two chaps had it back up and running barely 20 mins later :laugh_at: )
