Over the course of a few years I spent a lot of time in a secure environment in a DoD facility to which I had to travel multiple times for a project. The environment, a maze of cubicles filled with computers, had been installed inside a historic building. For historic preservation reasons, the exterior windows were kept as built. For security reasons, there was a sheet of plywood painted white inside all of the windows. The building allowed no natural light to enter and emitted only a diffuse glow. It was a miserable place to spend long days, illuminated only by flickering fluorescent light.
We had some serious storms come through while I was there. A lot of the permanent residents went home. As I was a visitor and there just for as long as it took me to fix some problems, I was encouraged to stay and work late. I was assured that we would not lose power because the building had been recently equipped with a generator.
A storm came through and the building lost power. It was almost entirely pitch black in the building full of computers, which all went dark, fans and disks suddenly silent. A small fraction of the emergency lights came on. Most were in disrepair and never lit up. It turns out that in a secure environment, one has to make special arrangements to have someone inspect the emergency lighting. We heard the generator spin up. Still no computers, no lights.
In the darkness, one little nook came to life. This nook contained the coffee pot, microwave, and refrigerator. Apparently this organization considered only one piece of equipment important enough to be connected to the generator. We thereafter referred to it as the mission critical coffee pot.
I heard a legend once that someone at IBM in the "blue suit and tie" days found himself to be irreplaceable. So at his next contract negotiations, he politely demanded the dress code be removed from his contract.
And then he never shaved again, or wore anything more formal than a Hawaiian shirt. Much to the anger of his entire management chain.
I read this. I loved it. I remember it. But I cannot for the life of me find any references to it online and worry that I dreamed it all.
I would love if someone here has a reference to this and can share it with me. Or tell me I am truly crazy.
He lead the teams that created the world's first disk drive and the floppy drive. He later founded Seagate.
I did not find a reference to this incident, but he did have a love for Hawaiian shirts, and he did things like try to get his dog elected to Congress, so it would not seem too far fetched for him to do something like what you are describing.
My next headline element is "Al," as in Al Shugart, who passed on the other day. His passing was definitely an event that gave me the urge to post. While the world remembers Al as a tech industry pioneer, his significance for me was that he transformed my name from the obscure to the instantly recognizable, a fact which has required me with predictable regularity to respond to many of those to whom I am introduced, "no, no relation." Sometimes, especially at industry functions, I felt like wearing a sign.
I posted a humorous incident about this state of affairs back in my early blogging days. It was right after Paynter was just getting started with his well-known series of blogger interviews. I had the honor of being his first male subject. The immediate aftermath was a rash of "are you related?" emails. So I put up a post to set the record straight.
Anyway, Al Shugart was my kind of guy--brilliant, creative, irreverent, fun-loving, and dismissive of the establishment. This guy was wearing Hawaiian shirts to work decades before it became a hip way to show that you or your organization were leading-edge.
Al, who started out as an IBMer, was able to get away with thumbing his nose at the rigid IBM dress code of the fifties and sixties. That may not mean much to Gen-X or Yers, but if you were around in those days, as I was, and remember how quasi-militaristic things tended to be in the big business sector, including high-tech, you have to be impressed with Shugart's chutzpah. I'm proud to bear his name. Rest well, Al.
On being acquired by IBM things went downhill at the company I was working at - no kettles or coffee machines allowed and you had to buy your tea and coffee from the company store/machines (UK - probably run by Serco or some similar awfulness). All the cool computers taken off the desks and stuck in server rooms and you had to use a managed windows PC which in my case managed to crash once or more times a day thanks to some aspect of the Rational Clearcase filesystem driver.
I remember all the lectures from overconfident bullshitters with shiny shoes. A company run by salesmen. It is SO SO nice that IBM got eclipsed by the internet tech companies. Even if they are arrogant/difficult in their own way it was a victory for the technically and ethically competent.
It seemed then that IBM was where software went to die.
I did two separate stints at IBM, the most recent being back in 2017 or 2018 or so. I was part of the "Watson Health" <strike>organization</strike> debacle. And when I first got there one of the things I immediately noticed was that there was no longer any free coffee available. The only coffee availability was from the little embedded Starbucks stand near the lobby. Which both cost $$$ and conveniently closed well before most of us were done drinking coffee for the day.
Eventually we had to resort to the time honored tradition of buying a cheap Keurig style machine, and having a "community pot" in our area to buy k-cups, those disposable creamer packets, etc. This was the point where I realized that IBM is probably in its terminal phase.
Shame. I rather liked IBM at one time. Heck, my dream when I was in college was exactly go to to work for IBM and go to Boca to work on OS/2!
IBM took away in-house coffee in Australia about 10 years ago. Cost-cutting. What's coffee, cents a day? Great. So now all your consultants spend 45 minutes every morning going out for coffee.
Before I worked for IBM I asked a friend what it had been like. "Unbelievably bad", they said. "Worse than everyone had said it would be."
So I thought, it can't be that bad. How could it be? And when I worked there it was worse! So when the next friend who got approached asked me I said, my god, remember how bad friend -1 said it was, well, it's worse! And that friend thought, no, it can't be that bad. And then they worked there and found it worse than even I had explained.
Ugh. I worked at a place that used Clearcase. It seemed to cause more problems than just dealing with the annoyances of other source control systems. I'm pretty sure companies that use it need to hire someone just to manage the thing. I've passed on job postings and offers at the mere mention of "Clearcase experience a plus" or similar.
Actual security issues like not swiping to enter a secured area are one thing, but I'll never understand the obsession with dress codes and small appliances. It just feels like power tripping or laziness. There can be problems with some devices and with what people wear (and hygiene in general), but I'd much rather work at a place that addresses those issues only when needed while treating everyone like adults instead of like children who can't be trusted to pick out their own clothes.
The small appliance thing is at least a little bit quasi-legitimate. I mean, true, very few modern small appliances are just going to randomly burst into flame, and that's as true whether they are sitting in your kitchen or living room, or sitting in a corporate break room, or at your desk. But... the devil is in the details. From a fire safety perspective, I'd cite two things that cause me to say "quasi legitimate" about this:
1. Putting appliances in random places (like your cubicle) can sometimes lead people to running extension cords to power these additional devices. And excessively long, or poor quality, or "excessively long, poor quality" extension cords can absolutely be a fire hazard. This is especially true when people don't understand "current carrying capacity" vis-a-vis wire gauge and choose the wrong cord for a given load.
2. Space heaters. If you include space heaters in your definition of "small appliance", then there is a fairly real risk. First, it's very easy for flammable materials to simply get too close to the heating elements of the heater, and catch fire. Second, space heaters tend to draw a LOT of current - typically more than can be handled by your generic power strip. And people don't understand this, and will happily plug a space heater into a power strip, which will then melt, short out, and catch fire.
On balance, the odds of having a fire caused by most small appliances in offices is still probably fairly low, but the risk is non-zero. And having a blanket ban, instead of trying to distinguish "well, your blender is OK, but the space heater has to go" is just the slightly lazier way to dealing with it.
Dress codes have never had anything to do with treating people like children, they have to do with cultural adhesion.
We laugh at pictures of managers wearing near-identical suits and ties, and then we can look at a bunch of techies wearing near-identical tee shirts and hoodies and somehow not see a culture using clothes to signal belonging to the tribe.
There will always be tribal signals. It's clothes whether suits or plaid flannel, it's drinking bourbon or craft IPAs, it's playing golf or ultimate, it's being clean-shaven or bearded, it's driving a Tesla or a Caddy.
Some of us are not "joiners" and chafe at the idea of carefully selecting our clothes, grooming, music, possessions, and neighbourhood to signal that we want to fit in. But we should at least understand and empathize with why others may find these things comforting.
one of the reasons for no small appliances is that some people will bring in a $45 portable 1500W electric space heater and put it under their desk, because they feel cold, and they have totally no idea of the problems and difference that adding a 1500W resistive electric load (vs like a 25W desk lamp) to the shared 15/20A 120VAC circuits in a cubicle farm can cause. those things are absolute fire hazards when used in the wrong environment.
Regarding dress codes, I worked at a three-letter company in the 90s that changed their dress code to allow us to wear shorts, as long as they were "tasteful." And that worked well at the start. But then a couple of the rebels, who were more than happy to be considered rebels, started wearing the moral equivalent of running shorts, which back in those days went above mid-thigh.
That lasted about a month, and then shorts were no longer allowed.
I worked in an office with a fire hazard coffee pot.
One of my coworkers wanted a coffee pot on his desk. He found an automatic drip coffee maker at a garage sale. It had a broken switch. Being a frugal engineer, he routed a wire past the switch and just turned it on and off by connecting and disconnecting it from the wall socket.
More than once, I was working late and noticed the smell of it burning through the last dregs of the pot because he had forgotten to disconnect it. The first few times, I disconnected it. Finally, I threw it in a garbage can and probably saved the building from an eventual fire.
I know it is annoying to have rules, but there are reasons for fire codes and facilities managers. I know too many people like my previous coworker.
I don't know if this is what you intend to imply, but it sounds like you're justifying the "all coffee makers are fire hazards" rule with an anecdote about a jimmy-rigged coffee maker (which never actually even caught fire, although I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if it would have done). Certainly permitting coffee makers increases the risk of fire above "no coffee makers", but both are in a completely different risk ballpark to "jimmy-rigged coffee makers". I also don't know if coffee makers are expressly forbidden in building codes or if it's just an over-zealous facilities manager policy (and perhaps in either case it's a legacy from a bygone era where these things caught fire more frequently than today).
So, has anyone here ever, like... worked in a regular office? Not the Apple Mothership or anything like that, just like a small office for a business with like 50 people in it?
If you go into the break room in a place like that, you're going to see consumer grade coffee makers. Again and again. They're totally normal.
How does an over-heated pot of glass and plastic catch fire? If coffee-making machine are fire hazard, most homes in the world must be regularly burning.
Given that the overwhelming evidence, for example the fact that no house has burned in a large radius around my home, I'd say your and IBM's assessment is wildly off-target.
As long as it wasn't a very old coffee pot, and just the switch was bypassed, it was probably still very safe. Coffee pots that meet UL standards have one or more safety mechanisms, and likely a thermostat on top of that.
This is why rules are often not enough to create a desired outcome. Beaurocracy fails when it doesn't account for human motivation.
In this case, the best option would be to involve management or HR, or even facilities management in the positive step of buying a better coffee maker for the office. Failing to provide access to safely brewed good coffee was the bug here.
This is HN, so I feel free to nerd-pick: IBM was right about the coffee maker!
Really, consumer-grade coffee makers aren't intended to stay on for days at a time. You need commercial machines for that, all metal and glass, that won't be a fire hazard or have melting plastic. Some facilities have strict rules about that.
When corporate offices gripe about employees bringing in home items the reason it isn't received well isn't because the rule is ridiculously illogical.
The problem is that those companies are notoriously cheap. They won't buy coffee makers or poorly maintain them and their managers are trained to act like callous idiots when questioned about it. Really, in general, most employee disatisfaction comes from managers and executives acting like callous idiots instead of actually trying to solve problems.
There’s delicious irony in the fact that putting a (useless, if not for IBM’s rules) cardboard box over a coffee maker slightly increases the fire hazard.
1. If they're not meant to stay on how come most of them have clocks?
2. Many machines no longer warm the coffee by using a heating element underneath a glass carafe, they've switched this out for insulated carafes (no glass) which tend to work better anyway.
>Really, consumer-grade coffee makers aren't intended to stay on for days at a time
Surely a coffee maker would get a break in the afternoon/evening? I agree that using it at a duty cycle higher than it was designed might be an issue, but unless you have the entire floor share one machine it should be fine.
I've got to be honest with you guys: I know you think all these things are "dangerous" and a "fire risk" but my closer network of startup engineers extends to 200+ and zero of them have been involved in a company with a serious emergency despite all the things we did.
This is also sort of why I like startups. You can have cultural cohesion. If you get a 10k person company, everyone has to conform to the one guy who believes that you can't have a vim pedal because the cable under your desk will cause you to fail to be protected in an earthquake.
No, thanks, I'll take the risk of tripping on the cable while the earthquake is on.
When I worked at EA, someone brought his own coffee maker to their cubicle because he liked brewing his own and having it just they way he liked it. No one had any problems with this as far as red tape or corporate policy goes.
However... we were a bunch of game developers. So everyone had a high-powered Windows PC and one or two console dev kits in their cube. The PS3s were so notoriously power hungry that in summer months people would run box fans to try to blow off some of the waste heat.
Each circuit in that poor building was heavily loaded. The coffee maker had to go once someone finally realized that turning it on was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused the circuit for that row of cubes to trip and everyone's UPS to kick in.
This brings to mind the legendary "property passes" from Commodore / Amiga. These were passes to remove property from the office, so if you brought in personal property, you'd need to get a property pass issued to remove it at the end of the day. Of course the security guy handing out the passes was clueless, so the engineers would get property passes for Boeing 747s, Cray X-MPs (just in case Commodore ever bought a cray, the lucky holder of the property pass would presumably be able to wheel it out the door), and so on. Dave Haynie records these stories in his "Deathbed Vigil", though the property pass story seems virtually unmentioned on the textual web, aside from an everything2 source.
This sounds like a one-pixel attack, but on robotic corporate procedures rather than robotic neural networks. Corporate culture as an entity, with rules of it's own, that evolves just like a neural network trained on weights is a great analogy to chew on...I wonder what determines the architecture and weights of that NN?
[+] [-] mcculley|3 years ago|reply
We had some serious storms come through while I was there. A lot of the permanent residents went home. As I was a visitor and there just for as long as it took me to fix some problems, I was encouraged to stay and work late. I was assured that we would not lose power because the building had been recently equipped with a generator.
A storm came through and the building lost power. It was almost entirely pitch black in the building full of computers, which all went dark, fans and disks suddenly silent. A small fraction of the emergency lights came on. Most were in disrepair and never lit up. It turns out that in a secure environment, one has to make special arrangements to have someone inspect the emergency lighting. We heard the generator spin up. Still no computers, no lights.
In the darkness, one little nook came to life. This nook contained the coffee pot, microwave, and refrigerator. Apparently this organization considered only one piece of equipment important enough to be connected to the generator. We thereafter referred to it as the mission critical coffee pot.
[+] [-] mabbo|3 years ago|reply
And then he never shaved again, or wore anything more formal than a Hawaiian shirt. Much to the anger of his entire management chain.
I read this. I loved it. I remember it. But I cannot for the life of me find any references to it online and worry that I dreamed it all.
I would love if someone here has a reference to this and can share it with me. Or tell me I am truly crazy.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Shugart
He lead the teams that created the world's first disk drive and the floppy drive. He later founded Seagate.
I did not find a reference to this incident, but he did have a love for Hawaiian shirts, and he did things like try to get his dog elected to Congress, so it would not seem too far fetched for him to do something like what you are describing.
[+] [-] severine|3 years ago|reply
My next headline element is "Al," as in Al Shugart, who passed on the other day. His passing was definitely an event that gave me the urge to post. While the world remembers Al as a tech industry pioneer, his significance for me was that he transformed my name from the obscure to the instantly recognizable, a fact which has required me with predictable regularity to respond to many of those to whom I am introduced, "no, no relation." Sometimes, especially at industry functions, I felt like wearing a sign.
I posted a humorous incident about this state of affairs back in my early blogging days. It was right after Paynter was just getting started with his well-known series of blogger interviews. I had the honor of being his first male subject. The immediate aftermath was a rash of "are you related?" emails. So I put up a post to set the record straight.
Anyway, Al Shugart was my kind of guy--brilliant, creative, irreverent, fun-loving, and dismissive of the establishment. This guy was wearing Hawaiian shirts to work decades before it became a hip way to show that you or your organization were leading-edge.
Al, who started out as an IBMer, was able to get away with thumbing his nose at the rigid IBM dress code of the fifties and sixties. That may not mean much to Gen-X or Yers, but if you were around in those days, as I was, and remember how quasi-militaristic things tended to be in the big business sector, including high-tech, you have to be impressed with Shugart's chutzpah. I'm proud to bear his name. Rest well, Al.
[+] [-] smiddereens|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] t43562|3 years ago|reply
I remember all the lectures from overconfident bullshitters with shiny shoes. A company run by salesmen. It is SO SO nice that IBM got eclipsed by the internet tech companies. Even if they are arrogant/difficult in their own way it was a victory for the technically and ethically competent.
It seemed then that IBM was where software went to die.
[+] [-] mindcrime|3 years ago|reply
Eventually we had to resort to the time honored tradition of buying a cheap Keurig style machine, and having a "community pot" in our area to buy k-cups, those disposable creamer packets, etc. This was the point where I realized that IBM is probably in its terminal phase.
Shame. I rather liked IBM at one time. Heck, my dream when I was in college was exactly go to to work for IBM and go to Boca to work on OS/2!
[+] [-] jen729w|3 years ago|reply
Before I worked for IBM I asked a friend what it had been like. "Unbelievably bad", they said. "Worse than everyone had said it would be."
So I thought, it can't be that bad. How could it be? And when I worked there it was worse! So when the next friend who got approached asked me I said, my god, remember how bad friend -1 said it was, well, it's worse! And that friend thought, no, it can't be that bad. And then they worked there and found it worse than even I had explained.
And so it goes.
[+] [-] gonzo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bokchoi|3 years ago|reply
this made me laugh, thanks
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|3 years ago|reply
Ugh. I worked at a place that used Clearcase. It seemed to cause more problems than just dealing with the annoyances of other source control systems. I'm pretty sure companies that use it need to hire someone just to manage the thing. I've passed on job postings and offers at the mere mention of "Clearcase experience a plus" or similar.
[+] [-] autoexec|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrime|3 years ago|reply
1. Putting appliances in random places (like your cubicle) can sometimes lead people to running extension cords to power these additional devices. And excessively long, or poor quality, or "excessively long, poor quality" extension cords can absolutely be a fire hazard. This is especially true when people don't understand "current carrying capacity" vis-a-vis wire gauge and choose the wrong cord for a given load.
2. Space heaters. If you include space heaters in your definition of "small appliance", then there is a fairly real risk. First, it's very easy for flammable materials to simply get too close to the heating elements of the heater, and catch fire. Second, space heaters tend to draw a LOT of current - typically more than can be handled by your generic power strip. And people don't understand this, and will happily plug a space heater into a power strip, which will then melt, short out, and catch fire.
On balance, the odds of having a fire caused by most small appliances in offices is still probably fairly low, but the risk is non-zero. And having a blanket ban, instead of trying to distinguish "well, your blender is OK, but the space heater has to go" is just the slightly lazier way to dealing with it.
[+] [-] a4isms|3 years ago|reply
We laugh at pictures of managers wearing near-identical suits and ties, and then we can look at a bunch of techies wearing near-identical tee shirts and hoodies and somehow not see a culture using clothes to signal belonging to the tribe.
There will always be tribal signals. It's clothes whether suits or plaid flannel, it's drinking bourbon or craft IPAs, it's playing golf or ultimate, it's being clean-shaven or bearded, it's driving a Tesla or a Caddy.
Some of us are not "joiners" and chafe at the idea of carefully selecting our clothes, grooming, music, possessions, and neighbourhood to signal that we want to fit in. But we should at least understand and empathize with why others may find these things comforting.
[+] [-] walrus01|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scioto|3 years ago|reply
That lasted about a month, and then shorts were no longer allowed.
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
When there’s no clients it can be a bit silly. But if one department has to toe the line all of them will.
[+] [-] dddddaviddddd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcculley|3 years ago|reply
One of my coworkers wanted a coffee pot on his desk. He found an automatic drip coffee maker at a garage sale. It had a broken switch. Being a frugal engineer, he routed a wire past the switch and just turned it on and off by connecting and disconnecting it from the wall socket.
More than once, I was working late and noticed the smell of it burning through the last dregs of the pot because he had forgotten to disconnect it. The first few times, I disconnected it. Finally, I threw it in a garbage can and probably saved the building from an eventual fire.
I know it is annoying to have rules, but there are reasons for fire codes and facilities managers. I know too many people like my previous coworker.
[+] [-] throwaway894345|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|3 years ago|reply
If you go into the break room in a place like that, you're going to see consumer grade coffee makers. Again and again. They're totally normal.
[+] [-] pierrebai|3 years ago|reply
Given that the overwhelming evidence, for example the fact that no house has burned in a large radius around my home, I'd say your and IBM's assessment is wildly off-target.
[+] [-] kube-system|3 years ago|reply
https://www.electrical-forensics.com/Coffeemakers/CoffeeMake...
[+] [-] thomastjeffery|3 years ago|reply
In this case, the best option would be to involve management or HR, or even facilities management in the positive step of buying a better coffee maker for the office. Failing to provide access to safely brewed good coffee was the bug here.
[+] [-] _Algernon_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maursault|3 years ago|reply
Did you take his red stapler, too, Lumbergh?
[+] [-] crispyambulance|3 years ago|reply
Really, consumer-grade coffee makers aren't intended to stay on for days at a time. You need commercial machines for that, all metal and glass, that won't be a fire hazard or have melting plastic. Some facilities have strict rules about that.
[+] [-] kodah|3 years ago|reply
The problem is that those companies are notoriously cheap. They won't buy coffee makers or poorly maintain them and their managers are trained to act like callous idiots when questioned about it. Really, in general, most employee disatisfaction comes from managers and executives acting like callous idiots instead of actually trying to solve problems.
[+] [-] sokoloff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeryan|3 years ago|reply
1. If they're not meant to stay on how come most of them have clocks?
2. Many machines no longer warm the coffee by using a heating element underneath a glass carafe, they've switched this out for insulated carafes (no glass) which tend to work better anyway.
https://www.nbcnews.com/select/shopping/best-coffee-makers-b...
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|3 years ago|reply
The hand wringing is not necessary.
[+] [-] gruez|3 years ago|reply
Surely a coffee maker would get a break in the afternoon/evening? I agree that using it at a duty cycle higher than it was designed might be an issue, but unless you have the entire floor share one machine it should be fine.
[+] [-] monkeybutton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomastjeffery|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|3 years ago|reply
The plants had large office staffs, so having different rules for offices was more complex, and the culture of uniformity was a thing for them.
[+] [-] renewiltord|3 years ago|reply
This is also sort of why I like startups. You can have cultural cohesion. If you get a 10k person company, everyone has to conform to the one guy who believes that you can't have a vim pedal because the cable under your desk will cause you to fail to be protected in an earthquake.
No, thanks, I'll take the risk of tripping on the cable while the earthquake is on.
[+] [-] munificent|3 years ago|reply
However... we were a bunch of game developers. So everyone had a high-powered Windows PC and one or two console dev kits in their cube. The PS3s were so notoriously power hungry that in summer months people would run box fans to try to blow off some of the waste heat.
Each circuit in that poor building was heavily loaded. The coffee maker had to go once someone finally realized that turning it on was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused the circuit for that row of cubes to trip and everyone's UPS to kick in.
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