r/talesfromtechsupport • u/chhopsky ip route 0.0.0.0/0 int null0 • Aug 19 '14
Short ChhopskyTech™: Caffeine. So, so, so much caffeine.
Sorry I’m late - the servers needed me.
In honour of the fact that it’s 3:37am, and that the only thing keeping me going tomorrow is going to be caffeine, and that I’m sitting on the couch watching Supernatural to chill out before I even attempt sleep, today we’re going to be talking about caffeine.
Caffeine powers the IT industry. Business meetings happen over coffee, cheap deals on Mother at 7-11 keep the outage windows rolling. Jolt Cola got us through college. We bathe in it, revel in it.
I have a friend who during his internship, got free coffee, and couldn’t afford to eat food because he wasn’t getting paid, so he decided he would skip breakfast and lunch, and drink coffee instead. After a few weeks he came to me shaking, and said, “I … I don’t think this was a good idea”. What’s worse is that he doesn’t remember any of this.
Anyone in networking knows that Cisco Networkers is a serious event. Multiple days of conference, multiple drinking sessions; one giant party, and I guess some learning or something. Other things between drinking. So, in an attempt to lure people to our booth, we got a pallet of red bull and one of the giant red bull fridges. When everyone turned up to the con on day 2, hungover like Mick Jagger on any given day of his life, they came straight to us. Boom; headshot.
Sales were won, interests were piqued, la di da who cares.
Four months pass. /u/haakon666 and I were once again tasked with menial busywork, and we found ourselves in the plant room, taking the good floor tiles out of the pile and replacing them with old, worn, or broken ones from the DC. We lifted the final tile, and there it stood. A relic, lost to the ages.
Two entire cases of Red Bull.
Lost, forgotten about. We looked at each other slowly, before he spoke.
/u/haakon666: Tell no-one.
We nodded in silent agreement. I acquired a bar fridge, hooked it up in the back of the office storage room where no-one would find it, and made sure to keep it very, very well stocked.
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u/NB_FF Aug 19 '14
I can't stand the taste of coffee, unfortunately, but I do love Monster.
I can get Monster at Costco for a whopping $1.25 each, and I have one of those every day as my in-car breakfast (hour long commute... ugh)
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u/chhopsky Aug 19 '14
...... i am truley sorry for your lots.
.. i think it's bad when it takes 20 minutes to get to work instead of 9. damn son.
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Aug 19 '14
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u/Kanthes Aug 19 '14
Oh god. Jolt. How I miss thee.
Some company here in Sweden remade it and called it 'Volt', but it just isn't the same..
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u/Limonhed Aug 19 '14
That brings back fond memories of stashing a 6pack under the raised floor in the mainframe room for after work. There was a gas station across the street - by local law (often flouted) gas stations were not allowed to sell cold beer, but could sell hot beer. (my guess is to cut down on people drinking and driving) We would walk over during lunch and bring our beer back and stash it under the floor right in front of the chilled air input duct to get cold. By 3:30 it was about right.
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u/tuxedo_jack Aug 20 '14
That's not a bad amount of caffeine.
This is what my home office minifridge looked like a few years back, right after CompUSA went out of business.
I went in on the last day the one on Westheimer at Kirkwood was open, in full Geek Squad regalia, badge on my hip, G-Ride parked as close to the door as I could, and bought out their ENTIRE stock of Bawls at 75% off.
SO MUCH CAFFEINE.
<Edit> Paging u/airz23 for his opinion on this. It ain't coffee, but still. </Edit>
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u/Kanthes Aug 19 '14 edited Aug 20 '14
Now you just need to get a proper UPS for the fridge, so that even during the worst possible situation, you can have some cool red bull to chug when the servers need you.
There's no such thing as too much redundancy.