Tales… from the NOC Keeper

Good Evening, Network EnginSNEERS and System DEFENESTRATORS! It is I, The NOC Keeper, with a tale of ghoulish fright.
So keep on reading this Web BLARGH, and be prepared for
NETWORK HORROR STORIES!
Bill Alderson:
(This story is lightly embellished.)
An organization long ago experienced a problem with a server mysteriously in the middle of the night at about the same time. After much ado, an investigation was launched and two candidates were chosen (drew the short straws) to spend the night in the “troubled facility” one Halloween.
Alas, about the time expected the two huddled technologists noticed a beam of light mysteriously approaching. Soon they heard steps and an old man with a deep scratchy voice coughing. Both technologists now standing in a “puddle of p*** with snot bubbles blowing from their noses” heard a loud clank come from the area of the server.
Scared to death, they called out with a scream, leaping toward the night watchman as he turned grabbing his chest noticing the pair wide eyed in the corner of the office.
The watchman placed his huge magnetic flashlight each night on a metal case in the office allowing him to focus the light beam down the long cubical area as he made his appointed rounds. The watchman had no idea it was the departmental server he was disturbing each night.
Loyde Hales:
(This is a true story, delivered first-hand by the seaman involved.)
Serving on a USNS aircraft carrier as the senior computer/network specialist, our Heroic Seaman was regularly called to one of the operations centers to fix an errant piece of hardware. As the case happened, this particular equipment had the tendency to “cautiously predict a problem,” causing failover to less sophisticated systems. No, it was not designed by a large company in Redmond, Washington. After the couple of failures, our Heroic Seaman detected a pattern, which he promptly recorded in the logs for future evaluation. Any time he reported to “repair” the equipment, he made a point to explain to the department’s watch what had happened and the very simple way to fix it.
Weeks go by, and he’s still getting regular calls at all hours for the same issue. One late night, he decides to at least enjoy being called from his bunk. Grabbing some accouterments to aid in his “debugging”, chiefly in the form of bells and feathers, he proceeds to do a “voodoo dance” (his words) around the equipment in the room. In one of the passes of the room, he surreptitiously touched the reset button, causing the system to check its state and resume primary function. He then remarks that “that should do it” and nonchalantly leaves.
The Navy, however, was not amused. By afternoon, he found himself before the Brass to have explained loudly
that the Navy would not have a voodoo dance in the log or the resolution report, and he’d better amend his position immediately.
Jim Duster:
My first high tech company in Austin was ITMasters, and we were officed out of very small rental offices on Pond Springs road. We had to keep two oscillating floor fans going in the server room to keep the servers cooled. You had to be careful not to plug the coffee pot AND the microwave into the same socket as the HP server. Brownouts were normal. One day, 4pm, sun in the sky, we had a complete all lights out dark episode. The whole building went off the electrical grid. We found out it was caused by a squirrel who had climbed the telephone pole outside the server room and stretched a long stretch between the hi-line wire and the actual transformer coupler. One of our programmers described it as “first you saw this huge blue arc, then you saw the squirrel going one way and his tail going the other way”. Took us several hours to get power restored.