Help desk gets a report of a transaction-processing failure at a remote site — and it turns out the local database server has completely failed, reports a pilot fish in the know.

“The tech working the issue reported that processing was automatically rerouted to a central server,” fish says. “Shortly after that, the remote server was back up — and then back down.

“Suspecting some sort of intermittent hardware failure, staff prepared replacement hardware. Techs worked through the night to build and configure a completely new database server, and were dispatched early in the morning to complete the hardware swap.

“When they arrived at the remote site, they found that the server was sitting on the floor in a very dirty location — and someone had placed a glue-board rat trap directly behind the server. The heat from the server had caused the glue in the rat trap to melt and flow into the server, causing the hardware failure.

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