Data centers of the damned

It’s that time of year again: Halloween, with its accompanying frights. Unfortunately, hair-raising tech environments live on all year round when execs pinch pennies or simply choose not to maintain the standards necessary to keep computers running and data flowing.

Off the Record writers have lived and worked in these haunted houses, where the technological equipment is threatened by leaky roofs, contamination, and poor ventilation.

[ The tech inferno is not buried deep within the earth — it’s just down the hall. Do the nine circles of IT hell sound familiar? | Follow Off the Record on Twitter for tech’s war stories, career takes, and off-the-wall news. ]

Managers who don’t recognize the issues further magnify the problem, and their inaction often sends the tech pro to find another position — but not without first providing a story of how bad the job can become.

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• A tech pro lands a job at a manufacturing plant and finds that management’s extreme attempts to cut costs brings one horror after another, from the hair-raising environmental oversights to the perils of being a one-man IT department.
• Sure, tropical locales can be exciting. But not when they’re in the server room.
• After being unemployed for several months, an IT specialist takes a job with a consulting company and goes on-site — and finds a hole in the ground teeming with workers wearing hazmat suits.
• Temperature control? Grounding? Prower? A techie remembers customers in the early computer days who did not understand the need for a hardware-friendly environment.

This story, “Data centers of the damned,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more crazy-but-true stories in the anonymous Off the Record blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.