We were hanging tarps from the metal hangers for the drop ceiling.
Let me back up a few steps here. Our building's roof has a leaking problem. It's really more like our open air office has a ceiling problem. It's always leaked. It leaks into the flourescent light near my desk (the tubes are disconnected anyway; I'm not too worried about it arcing). Maintenance has dealt with this, historically, with a complicated system of tarps and buckets above the drop ceilings in the office space.
In the last torrential downpour, one of those buckets fell through the drop ceiling and directly onto the chair of an employee who was, fortunately, out of the office that day. It probably would have killed her: it was about 100 kg of water. While maintenance was moving her to a new office, the electric in the neighboring office was flickering on and off intermittently. The occupants of that office informed me that it happened a lot and it's why they had UPSes. It usually happened when the cleaning guys were running a vacuum, so someone must be vacuuming the office next door. I pointed out there was no vacuum. They got moved too.
A week ago tomorrow, every analog phone line into the building was down. Rain had leaked on to the comms slick next to the shiny new data center, built in what was formerly warehouse space as the first step of the renovations. The phones didn't work right till Tuesday night, and the phone monkey didn't really get sleep till Wednesday (when he didn't show up for work). This morning, there was a ceiling tile showing water damage in the tape vault, on the opposite of the data center from the comms slick.
This afternoon, there was a ceiling tile over the entranceway to the data center showing water damage.
So, as I said, we were hanging tarps from the metal hangers for the ceiling tiles in the data center. We don't really expect this to keep water from being a problem (it can still run in, down, through the raised floor, and into the electric. But since we have a 24/7 computer operator, we hope that it will slow the progress enough that he'll notice, contain the leak if possible, and page us to shut the systems down if it's not possible.
Why the roof wasn't fucking fixed when they renovated that end of the building isn't a question anyone seems able to answer.
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