I've just moved into a serviced office in the course of setting up my IT services firm. The office I was assigned hadn't had a tenant for quite a while (as evidenced by the layer of dust coating pretty much everything). When I first walked in, sitting under the desk was an ancient beige tower PC, with its associated CRT, KB and mouse on the desk itself. It didn't appear to be doing anything, or even to be on for that matter. I had been given little to no information about the office and therefore asked the receptionist who had shown me in what the machine was doing there. She didn't seem to know, so I (somewhat arrogantly) assumed that it was a leftover from the previous tenant or had just been dumped there. I dismantled it and put it in a corner in order to set up my own PC, meaning to ask about where to move it to later.
The next day, as I walked in, the receptionist (a different one) told me that the owner of the office complex had emailed to say that the machine needed to be put back where I found it and switched back on. 'Back on?' I thought. 'It didn't seem on in the first place!'. I naturally asked why, only to be told that she didn't know and to ring the owner directly. 'OK,' I thought, and headed to the office to do just that. It turns out that that PC was essentially the central logger for their PABX system. Without it active, no calls were being logged, and therefore everyone had been calling essentially for free for a day! Whoops.
Hang on though, why was such a critical application running on an ancient Windows 95-era PC? More to the point why was it in an office that they were then renting out? I asked both of these questions, only to be told that there was no money and no need(!) to upgrade, and that there wasn't anywhere else for the machine to go. I had little choice but to turn the machine on and get the application working. The machine ran Windows 98 (to be honest, I had expected to see 95) and then some proprietary PABX software that looked like it had been written by a ten-year-old. Surprisingly, it booted and began logging without issue. When I called back to tell the owner that he could relax, I raised the issue of what happens when the dinosaur finally dies (with the implication that I could help him migrate to something more 21st Century). He said that the software had been running on a laptop until a year ago when that died, and that this machine was the backup. As for what happens when the backup needs a backup? "Well when that happens we'll sort something out".
Let us count the WTFs:
- Firstly, my arrogance. If you find a machine plugged in somewhere, and you don't know its status/use exactly, don't go dismantling it! *facepalm*
- Then again, not labelling such a critical system and/or not telling the office staff what it is when someone moves in to its home isn't exactly clever
- Running a business-critical application on a late-90s Gateway tower PC.
- Not having a plan in place for when the aforementioned dinosaur goes the way of the, er, dinosaurs, despite the system being down for slightly under a day being cause for panic.