The Thursday Night Incident

On the night of 7 December 2023, a Computing Meeting took place. Dan Wade was away, and so the meeting was chaired by Jamie Parker-East, with surprisingly little chaos.

One of the agenda items was that some replacement UPS batteries had arrived, and those present (Max Moir, Ashley Bryan, Alyx Bruno-Bamford, and Jamie) agreed to fit them after the meeting. Jamie had degree to do, leaving the others to take out the UPS and replace its batteries.

Somehow, this turned into them taking apart the entire server rack, dusting the servers, and reorganising all the connections. The only problem came at around 6am, when they hadn't quite got to the "put it all back together" step before they started to feel sleepy. And there was a YSTV Live that day. Oops.

Ashley, with the help of Liam Burnand (even though the former had not slept yet and the latter had work), got troubleshooting. They got as far as getting Web back operational (somewhat), but various other services were still inoperative.

YSTV Live came around, and the gallery was still in a bit of a state. Many of the habitual techies weren't about (Marks Polakovs was in a theatre in town operating lights for a CHMS show, and Jamie was... I can't actually remember where). Eventually Beth Marsch, with the help of Will Stirk and Joe Radford (who just happened to be there) managed to get the gallery working enough for YSTV Live to kick off half an hour behind schedule.

It took another day (and the intervention of Dan and Marks Polakovs) before all (well, almost all) computing services were fully operational. Lesson learned: don't take apart half the gallery at 2am without a plan for putting it back together.

The incident was later immortalised as an Everything's Fine skit.