The Calamity
I was newly armed with my very own PFY, Skip. Head of HR (HoHR) had been placed on an administrative-leave by the CEO. It was a good time at $Company, not even Dan's existence was bringing me down. The PFY offered to take On-Call duty for a few while I got my head back on right, and even played interference with Dan. Our ticket times were dramatically down, even lower than when it was Motorcycle IT Guy and myself. The two months between the PFY's arrival went without a hitch. As an added bonus the weather was even getting better. Times were good, but peace, of course, will always be violently shattered at the most inconvenient moment.
"rstrt, wake up. The phone is going to wake the baby." My wife shook my shoulder to wake me.
"Sorry, I shouldn't be on call." I looked at the phone and answered. "What's up, Skip?"
"rstrt, you need to come down here. We've got a problem." I rubbed my eyes and sat up.
"I figured as much, what is it?"
"Well, I don't really know how to explain this one. Um, okay, so I got a call from the building manager. Said that there was a building emergency, but didn't go into detail." I was already brewing a cup of coffee for the road. I threw some jeans on, grabbed my emergency go-bag, and hopped into my car. I arrived to the office twenty minutes later, greeted at the gate by a familiar face.
"It's pretty bad in there, the police are everywhere. Take this, is not safe to go alone." Nerdy was the IT guy on the third floor. We frequently hung out and commiserated on our jobs. He handed me a donut.
"Had I known you gave out donuts, I'd have hired you instead of my PFY."
The lobby was not a pretty sight, there were police officers everywhere. The sysadmins were huddled in a group. The second floor admin, Jabba the Butt, wore a Star-Wars shirt that looked like it wouldn't fit my wife. The PFY was sitting on a counter a few feet back, obviously being excluded from the club.
"Where's MITG?" Jabba grunted, shoving a donut down his gullet.
"He quit, I'm the new sysadmin on six."
"You didn't inform us of that on IRC." Greasy croaked. Greasy looked like he hadn't showered in a week, which is why we call him Greasy.
"Doesn't matter, what happened?"
"Maglock alarms went off at 0200, temperature sensors about five minutes later." Geoff said. Geoff was the sysadmin from 5. Well put together, young guy. Spent a couple years in the military and then when into the private sector. No one in the building knew what the tenant on 5 did, when asked they quoted some classification that I had never heard of. The admins chatted back and forth, mostly complaining that the Police weren't letting them up.
"Alright, the building is clear! You're free to go up now, but I need names and statements." a police officer shouted. The admins split to go investigate their respective systems, Greasy and Geoff went to the fifth floor, Jabba to the elevator to head for the second floor. I motioned to the PFY to follow me. On the 6th floor the glass door by the lobby was shattered, the wall-mounted TV was lying face down on the floor. Papers were flown all over the floors of each office, broken glass on the floor and missing electronics. The PFY and I made our way to the dregs and into the server room. Immediately we were greeted by a gust of hot air.
"Holy shit..." The PFY pointed at our primary rack. There were scorch marks on the wall behind the servers. The front of some of the servers were melted and burnt. The room smelled like burning plastic and silicon, the stench of technological death.
"Take pictures, Skip." He nodded as I grabbed my keys and fled away to the storage closet. The closet had cold-spares of all mission-critical systems. I loaded my hand truck with spares and went towards the server room. Several hours later we were barely hobbling along.
The PFY and I were sitting outside, coffees in hand from the deli. Nerdy was there, also nursing a cup. There were police walking in and out of the building, working on their investigation. The PFY and Nerdy were chatting about the damage and what conspiracy theories they each thought of. I finished my coffee and booted my laptop up. I remembered the security cameras that MITG secretly put into our server room. Maybe there would be a glimpse of the culprit. I couldn't RDP into the system, because I forgot that the non-critical VM server was one of the ones that we didn't have a cold spare for.
"Hey Skip, I need to go check on something. I'll see you up there in a bit." He nodded and Nerdy tipped his cup at me. Back on six I went to the VM server and pulled drive three. MITG was rather fond of using a physical drive linked to a VM, and the security system was linked to drive bay 3. I couldn't see any visible damage, so I put it in a dock and connected it to my laptop. The drive was blank. I ran some file recovery software on the drive and put my laptop out of plain view of someone passing by, or the PFY.
After all, he did say to trust no one…