So, my Director/CIO hires a fucking specialized cleaning company to come in and do the annual clean in our data center. Our datacenter has rules like 'no fucking cardboard' because the fibers can pass through the air conditioning filters, and the filters on hard disks and get in between the magnetic heads and cause premature drive failure.
So he hires this company that says they know what they are doing, and have cleaned data centers before. He stressed that they
cannot use propellant based cleaners, and
no ammonia because it will set off the smoke detectors.
So a half hour into the cleaning, the lights start flashing, the sirens go off and the fire suppression systems kicks in. Apparently they didn't know that windows cleaner has fucking ammonia and the can has propellant! The data center floods with fire suppressing gas (not Halon!).
But the cleaning crew doesn't leave, like all the signs say to do when the lights are flashing. And somehow the fucking sirens didn't phase them.
So a bunch of us run to the building where the data center is, and see what is up because our pagers are chirping that there is a fire detection event. One guy sticks his head in the room, to see if there really is a fire, and gets the cleaning crew out. So he, and the cleaning crew had to go to the emergency room to be checked out. One of the fucking cleaning crew is in serious condition, and the building had to be evacuated while the gas was cleared out.
And the worst part is that the fire suppression should trigger an EPO - Emergency Power Off - of the room. But everything kept running like normal! Not that I like recovering from an EPO, I like my sleep at night. But in the event of a real fire, a lot of secondary damage could occur.
We had a 'test' of the fire alarm panel that caused a faulty smoke detector to trigger an EPO last month, and I don't want another of those.
"May you live in interesting times" as the fucking curse goes.