Even More Tales of Technology Terror: Personal Stories of Tech Disaster

Shaken, Not Stirred…

In 1989, consultant Elizabeth Zwicky was working her way through another fall day. Then the earth started to move…

My scariest moment came just after the Loma Prieta earthquake. I was working on the third story of a three-story building, which had never seemed particularly tall to me until the very second that I could tell that the earth was standing still and the building wasn't.

We evacuated the building, and it became clear that the structure was still standing—as was civilization. But thanks to bridge and road damage, few people could actually get home. As the first shock wore off, we became a crowd of bored people standing around in a parking lot watching the asphalt ripple, and the novelty wears off that pretty quickly.

The company I worked for had its own generator, and the big ol' Sun systems we ran had so much capacitance that it didn't even crash when we flipped to generator power, so we had all sorts of computers and lights and whatnot still running when we left the building. Eventually somebody from management came around and said, "You know how in 1908 San Francisco burned down after the earthquake? We really need to do our part to avoid recreating that, so who'd like to volunteer to go turn stuff off in case floating clouds of gas come by?" Everybody volunteered, to which they said, "I gotta tell you, the structural engineers haven't been by, so technically, the building might fall down at any moment." We contemplated it. It didn't look like it was going to fall down. And by golly, it was our job! To save Menlo Park from fire! And it was not boring! So we kept on volunteering, and they carefully wrote down all our names, counted us off, regretted that they had no hard hats and advised us to leap for the middle of the building if the outside started to peel off. Then we moved inside to turn off everything electrical we could find.

I didn't get the most interesting wing, it turned out. That would be the one where they found the researcher still working. The people who found him had to explain that we were going to turn off the servers so there was really no point sticking it out. But I did get the wing with the most damage, forcing me at one point to climb over a downed filing cabinet to get to a computer located in one of the offices. It was an outside office, in the bit they had said might peel off. Worrisomely, it was also a low, stable, two-drawer file cabinet, not some tipsy high thing. But I climbed over it and started looking for power switches on the computer.

None on the front. Reached for the back. Couldn't reach. Lay on my stomach on the desk with my head under the bookshelves, groping for the power switch and...felt things shift underneath me. Immediate thought: "I am about to have my head crushed because I am an idiot. And if not, I am going to fall to my death when the building crumbles." Then I thought up a number of obscenities inappropriate for publication, directed in approximately equal proportions at myself and at the loose leg on the desk on which I was lying. The leg, as it turned out, was the only thing moving.

I got out from under the bookshelf, ripped all the power cords I could find out of the wall and moved on, though much faster—if more carefully.

The next day, we moved back into the building.

The week after that, we reevacuated the wing I'd been in because the structural engineers declared it unsafe.

Next: The Day the E-Mail Stood Still, and the Man Who Caught the Blame…

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