From the very late 1990’s up until the time I retired, I worked in an office. I chose a different career path that involved sitting in front of a computer doing things with other computers and servers for the British Healthcare system: the NHS.
There was indeed a rat, but not in our kitchen. The whole debacle started in our server room. Our server room was a large-ish room, full of servers, network equipment and backup power supplies. It had a raised floor, so we could run cables and fibres underneath the server racks and up into them from below.
The floor space
The whole building – a single story office building that had seven offices, three toilets and a kitchen – was built on a raised floor. For the heavy equipment in the server room, like the battery backups (there were three, three-phase battery arrays) and the big fire safe, there were concrete plinths, upon which these sat. Otherwise the whole building had an underfloor space of a good 450mm (18″), but everything you walked on (the floor) was at the same level throughout the building.
It made it very easy to run cabling: electrical supply cables for the power sockets, the lighting feeds and the data cables (for the old token ring network, then the ethernet network) were all run under the floor and up into waist height trunking.
Under the floor in the server room were various sensors: water (as the kitchen was opposite the server room door) fire and smoke. These were cabled as standard with armoured fire-resistant cabling.
Where’d my data go?
One fine day, towards the end of summer one year, we (the server team) took great amusement at the sight of the network team members, scurrying around the server room. They were based at the other end of site (with the management!) so this was unusual, especially as there were more than one of them. There were in fact five of them.
When this happened, it normally meant that we (the server team) would get an influx of support calls, as the network team were either a) doing work (and therefore breaking stuff) or b) breaking stuff. As that normally meant users couldn’t access server services, such as email or files, the Service Desk would direct the support tickets to us (the server team) first. SO we (the server team) girded our loins and awaited the influx.
It turned out that a remote site had lost connection back to the main hospital. Not only that, the backup line had been disconnected also. A few hours later, the network team decided to run a new fibre from the main network hub to a sub panel in the same room. This would restore connectivity and allow for further investigation whilst the temporary link had been established.
All went well – until one of the network team lifted the floor panel to route the new fibre. They called us (the server team) in to have a look. What we found was chewed ends of fibres and network cables.
We had rats.
Call the pest control!
We lifted a few more floor panels and witnessed more evidence of chewing and severed links. Luckily, we’d manged to discover this before anything really major went down (and prompted a whole investigation into why the network team weren’t monitoring their links!).
Remedial work commenced, whilst I logged a call with the Estates Department – the Department responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the buildings, electrics, plumbing, furniture and other building-related shenanigans. We (the server team, and I in particular) had a very good working relationship with them, as we often worked together on new build, new installations and all of the UPS/generator work and testing that we did on a monthly basis, so getting them to come and witness the rat carnage wasn’t difficult.
Lots of “oohing” and “aahing”, sucking of air past the lips and chin scratching later, the pest control man was called. The Rat Catcher, to you and me.
They duly arrived and went through the “oohing” and “aahing”, sucking of air past the lips and chin scratching ritual as is the wont of a British tradesperson, before asking “do you want traps, or poison?”.
The singlemost worst decision I’ve made
The decision was down to me (I was after all, in charge of the server room). I thought about it and said “can we have poison, please?”. The pest control chap looked for a minute and said “OK”. He then walked off to his van and started to deploy the rat poison in strategic places under the floor.
This turned out to be a very bad decision. The rats would eat the poison, then die. Brilliant, rats gone. Except of course they weren’t gone. They were dead, under the floor. And they could be anywhere under the floor, as there was access to the entire building under the floor. So they ate the poison, teetered off for a bit, then expired under the floor somewhere. And because they were dead, they started to decompose.
I don’t think much of your aftershave
For a few days after the rat catcher left, everything was good. We (the server team) had asked the network team to let us see their network monitoring software. So we setup a monitor on the wall in one of our offices that displayed the link status for the server room. If anything was chewed, we’d know about it. Great. All we had to do was wait until the rats had gone and we’d be good to go.
For a few days, we got on with our normal shit. One morning (I was usually first in), I opened the main door and was knocked back by a smell! It was a horrible smell – the kind of smell that had you retching. It was (of course) the smell of death. Decomposing rats smell.
And it was a horrible smell. Of course then we had to find the dead rats and get then disposed of. I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t gone outside to die, but there we are (joking, of course). Calls were logged with Estates and the dead rat hunt began.
We got them all in the end!
The smell would move from one end of the building to the other. We followed the smell, lifted the floor tiles and went rat hunting. In the meantime, winter had beset us. It was colder, so it preserved the dead rats a bit, dragging the whole process out. We had to wrap up in warm clothes whilst the windows were flung open wide to purge the stench! It took months for us to track down all of the bodies and still that smell persisted. We even found one (a dead one) in the ceiling tiles.
I walked around the building with a scarf wrapped around my face, soaking in some old aftershave I had at home, to try and mask the smell. We got through loads of air freshener sprays and plug-ins. It was horrendous. It wasn’t until well into April of the next year that we’d purged all the rats, but still that smell lingered. It was getting weaker, but the undertones of it was still there. When a new air freshener was bought (a frequent occurrence) one of us would sniff the air and say “I’m getting notes of peach, with an undertone of death”. It was funny at the time.
A learning experience
For sure, that was a learning experience. Should a similar situation ever arise for me, I wouldn’t ever make that same mistake again. Traps it is, every time.
In hindsight however, I’d love to know why the pest control chap didn’t warn me of the potential hazards that poisoning could cause. He must have known what was going to happen, so why didn’t he mention it? Sadly, I’ll never know.