Comment by incidel

1999, the town hall of a small municipality s/e of Stuttgart Germany. For the 3rd time in half a year me (IT apprentice) and senior developer are onsite to fix one MS SQL db's broken indizes. It's the early afternoon of friday and humid hot, a thunderstorm is on it's way. We toil on and are almost done when at about 16:00 the chief officer turns up and informs us that we have to hurry because at 17:00 all electricity will be cut in the building! Senior developer and me share a shocked glance. "Is this every friday?" "Why yes! We conserve lots of energy that way." Senior and me share another glance and on impulse I speak up. "Isn't the weekly db cleanup scheduled for 16:30 PM on fridays?" The senior developer nods. We spend the remaining hour to fix the problem and then cancel this weeks schedule and manually shut down the DB server for the time being. Every friday these guys cut the power to the building, causing all kinds of production issues with not only their Netware Server but also the DB server for their collections software (our product). As per maintenance contract we were required to repair the DB everytime which was a hassle and a waste of ressources on our behalf. In the end it took another month or so until they relented and rescheduled the hard power down until saturday morning so that all servers could shut down properly even AFTER the backup jobs could complete (backup was also totally broken but they never did check or even perform a restore so they never actually noticed).