Crazy to think we still usually install Windows to the C: Drive because otherwise some legacy software written before most of the people who'll read this tweet were born that is critical to the continued function of humanity won't understand it's not reading from a floppy drive

If this tweet goes viral there will be at least one person who asks me what a floppy drive is, and I will have to explain that even by the time I was born it was an archaic term that did not accurately describe the hardware it referred to

Working in a datacenter was horrifying, not only because of the 12-hour shifts but because of the creeping understanding of just how many critical pieces of the internet would collapse if a whole-ass Apple II that's just stuffed into rackspace somewhere in Wichita segfaults

There's a datacenter about 20 miles outside of London with carpeted floors

There was a rack within that datacenter about which I was very clearly told, and I quote, "never touch it no matter what awful sound you hear from inside it, unless actual smoke comes out."

My main duty is what is known as "remote hands," wherein I was called upon by clients to do physical things to their hardware that they could not do remotely.

Yes, this usually involved turning on servers they had accidentally shut down rather than restarted.

The building's UPS was a giant stack of car batteries in serial the size of the back half of my house

The switchover system for the backup generator looked like the console for a nuclear launch system, complete with a key in a glass case.

If the feed from the power grid went dead, the UPS could safely provide five minutes of power to the entire building, with up to two additional minutes depending on load. If the automatic switchover failed for some reason, the on-site technician would have to do it manually.

This involved a genuinely cool sequence of things you generally only see in action movies, but I had to be run through it three times before I just had to write it down. I absolutely 100% do not remember the exact sequence now and probably didn't then either.

I know it involved running between three separate rooms, including one that had a very large fume hazard warning sign on the outside

There were two backup generators, one of which was a backup backup for if the better one didn't work, but when I got there I was told that the secondary backup generator hadn't worked in months and if the first one failed you were basically entirely fucked

Part of the contingency briefing we got said "the fuel tank on the primary generator can provide enough power to sustain non-peak load in this facility for 72 hours, after which we have a contract with a fuel delivery company to keep it stocked for another three weeks."

It then said "the contract had the option for an extension if a power outage continues longer than three weeks, but management has decided that if a power outage continues longer than three weeks, the continuity of the facility is probably not going to be a high priority."

Now some of you may criticise this, but I think it was just a corporatespeak way of saying "we do not plan to maintain client service for a significant time after the literal apocalypse" which is actually fair enough in my opinion.

My first day at the job, one of the clients sent a rep who happened to be a guy I'd been getting down with at a gay kink club the previous Saturday.