Steven's Tale
Think of all those films you've seen where something becomes possessed. Now imagine for a moment how bad it would be if that multiplied itself by a factor of twelve. Unfortunately you'd still not be close to how much grief we were dealt by several inanimate objects that did indeed develop evil tendencies. You may be finding this hard to believe but let me give you a little insight.
One innocent Friday evening I decided, rather foolishly as it turns out, that I would actually have a life, I know I work for an ISP but strange things do happen. Anyway, said evening went rather well, much partying was done and drink was consumed which would result in a suitable hangover being expected the following morning. So, as bed beckoned at around 4am on Saturday little was I to know that come 9am I was going to be woken and oh yes, the hangover from hell reared it's ugly head. Several hours of unsuccessful remote tinkering and phone calls to my boss later it dawned on us that visiting the hardware on site was our only course of action. Mid-afternoon, having sobered up, we met at our office and headed off to our co-locate facility. Safe to say that it was the early hours of Sunday morning, no food and little liquids later we emerged after foolishly believing we now had the situation under control. Feeling rather relieved we meandered back, having a quick stop off at the nearest open service station for refreshment, to the office just to be sure. Now all this was bad enough but now comes the cruel part. Ten minutes after we had been monitoring the situation in the relative comfort of our office and were contemplating going home to bed the inevitable happened, it decided to fail again having survived for a few hours. Nothing for it but to once again head off to site. It would have been nice if this was down to ourselves being incompetent but with all our years of experience we didn't even have this to make us feel better.
I'll cut it short now, I did eventually get to bed just before it turned into Sunday afternoon and caught a couple of hours prior to getting up and monitoring the situation again before the working week once more came around.
Many, many more hours of sleep were lost across our team to outages caused by these things and believe me doing what we finally did to them was just so satisfying and maybe, just maybe they are no longer possessed.