The holy 29th, aka the Day of republic, was on tuesday, so of course nobody works on monday. Which meant a six day weekend, 25th to 30th of november. Everyone glad and happy, it's a big holiday. Only Žića took it on himself to take care, pay attention and whatever else... so he sent his security referent (a guy* from VIII2, accidentally, just like his pal, the fire security guy, was from IV3) to double check that all the equipment, specially in erc, was turned off.
Which succeeded and then some. The morning of 1st of december, when we came to work, nothing worked. Vaha is not just not booting, it has no power. The AC is off, the heating is off, or maybe on but it will take hours to make up for being six days off. Cold everywhere.
Traced the power cable to see where was the power coming from. Well, it vanishes in the floor. The floor in the system room was raised about 30cm, space below was where the AC blew through. The Vaha allegedly required a permanent temperature of 19 degrees to work properly, which may or may not be true but gave us an air of seriousness, as if we were some scientific institute. The AC was even larger than the computer.
We found the Vaha was plugged into a power strip, which also supplied both printers and three terminals in the system room. And the strip had its own switch, which was now off. Turned it on, okay, replaced the floorboard, started the boot sequence... and it won't. There's power, some lamps are on, printers are on, terminals are on, even the tape unit is on... it just won't boot.
Call Iskra Delta. They arrive urgently, check it out - ouch, one of the boards is fried (the processor, or memory or whatever - who knows how hardware was organized then). Because everything was cold, Žića ordered the heating be turned off too, so there was condensation on the electronics, shouldn't have tried to power it before it evaporates.
The next day Radoje went with Žića's driver to Surčin to get the new board from the customs, urgent delivery, and the guys from Novi came in parallel, and by noon the new board was being installed. We got memory doubled along the way, instead of two, we now had whopping four megabytes. But the clock was fried, or rather not the clock itself - every computer has to have one to work - but the bit which kept the time while the machine was turned off. So henceforth the boot sequence will have to include typing of the date and time.
The main thing is that nothing untoward has happened, because safety precautions were taken on time.
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* we said he was trying in vain, he will not get a preferential retirement staž (whereby a year would count as 14 months or so, which miners, foundry workers, cops were getting) because a key in the ear (which would hurt while eavesdropping through keyhole) does not count as adverse working condition.