Old Bomb Shelters
Want a piece of advice - if there's an old, boarded up hole in the ground, surrounded by reinforced concrete - leave it alone...

Many moons ago, I was a slave to the IT God - I worked long hours and suffered the many woes of a contractor doing Support roles and Admin work. After a while, my 'agency' (i.e. a bloke with a PO BOX address in the West End who ran the company out of his car) sent me to help a new setup in West London. Old shop was fitted out as an office for w*nky estate agent types and the cupboard under the stairs was where they wanted to keep the servers/panels/router.etc. "Not Feckin' likely!" was my reply (seeing as I'd be spending the majority of the next 6 months in there). "What's the basement like?"
"No idea" came the reply - "there's a lock on the door"

So it came to pass that one of the builders who were still working on the flat above lent me a crowbar, and we 'unearthed' the basement.

Only it wasn't a basement - it was a WW2 bomb shelter. I was in my element - my own bunker - I was the next bond villian! It was nice and cool, suprisingly damp free and after a visit to B&Q, had a nifty code lock on the now repaired door. The IT guy had a lair! (Not a spacious lair, not quite the hollowed out volcano, but it was all mine!).

Very quickly I discovered that being down in 'the bunker' wasn't the funtime it was supposed to be. During office hours, I might pop down to check on something, and there was always this air of 'oppression' down there - like someone was watching me. No matter how I set it, nor how many replacement batteries I 'obtained' the UPS nearest the door would never work and there was often this 'smell' which I could never quite describe other than it was 'nasty'.

Then one weekend, I had to work overnight to update all the desktops and install bits and pieces. "Don't worry" they said "charge it as out of hours and it's double time."
Sitting in a bomb shelter at 2am watching Service Pack after Service Pack install is boring, but add the chilled air, the sense that someone is watching you and the distant sounds of someone screaming... at one point I'm sure I heard the whistle of a falling bomb and the resulting explosion.
Suffice to say that the planned updates only got half done and the request to be moved to a new project was completed on Monday morning.

I'm guessing alot of it was my imagination, but something else was down there, it just wasn't... right.

A while later I did pop in to the office to say 'Hi' in passing - the servers were installed in the managers office and a very big padlock was bolted to the door that led down to the shelter. "No f*cker wants to go down there" was the MD's answer to my unasked question.

So I wasn't the only one to whimp out....
( HSDriver was probably still at work on, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 23:36, 1 reply)

no sympathy for you
you had your own evil lair! spooky or not, you still lived my dream!
*strokes cat and plans world domination*
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Fri 4 Jul 2008, 0:36, closed)