Tech 5, Charles 0

It's not been my week. The old Compaq Proliant 1600 (Dual PII-400 and a 5x9.1GB SCSI raid array) came back for fixing. Having found a replacement for the dud disk and re-built the array, one of the processor slots decides to give up the ghost and the power switch decides not to.

Several hours into some serious stress management (Oblivion) I smell fried components. I check the desktop, and it's running real cool, sniff the Proliant, unplug it out of paranoia. Smell persists. Look out of window (not the Microsoft kind), there's a cloud of something smokelike. I assume it's the cause of the smell. barely capable of running firefox, known as Smeagol) and the CRT powers up. There's a nice  bright horizontal white line. Found the fried component. I swap the CRT for another from the pile. No joy whatsoever. I pull Smeagol out from under the desk, disconnecting the KVM, and after half an hour of checking the system, power it up again. It works fine with the spare monitor. Scratch 1 KVM.

I decide sleep is the thing to do. Next thing I know, I'm woken up and told that Marvin (pob's fileserver) is beeping manically. It's the temperature alarm. Power off. Back to sleep.

When I wake up, I stagger upstairs to take a look at Marvin. It's full of dust. I pick marvin up and start carrying him downstairs for cleaning. Halfway down the stairs he makes a bid for freedom. But tech never escapes me that easily. Now he's somewhat blood-bound to me.

What Marvin Did to My Arm!: My arm after Marvin bit me!