Just Kidding!
Posted on 06/26/2023 7:18:46 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
It could be the plot of a dark comedy if it weren’t a science tragedy.
A janitor working in a laboratory who was annoyed by an incessant beep reportedly flipped a switch that killed the noise — but also shut off a storage freezer, destroying decades of scientific work, according to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute lab in Troy.
The cleaner’s alleged carelessness cost the lab at least $1 million in damages, a lawsuit the university filed against its third-party cleaning service charges.
“People’s behavior and negligence caused all this,” Michael Ginsberg, RPI’s attorney, told the Times Union in Albany. “Unfortunately, they wiped out 25 years of research.”
The super-cold freezer the custodial worker allegedly shut down held cell cultures, samples, and other elements stored at minus-112 degrees Fahrenheit, the Times Union said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
If it was that important, how could a janitor shut it down with one switch? I would think there would be some kind of lockout device.
It’s called a “NIC”. Every PDU and UPS in a well constructed data center has them.
Not that this excuses the actions of the janitor.
L
It’s a good thing he wasn’t working in a hospital.
Maybe a giant monster will emerge just in time for the elections!
“What is insane is that if all this work was so valuable, that the University didn’t have alarms for the freezer.”
What’s also insane is having a freezer that won’t SHUT THE HELL UP.
That annoying beep shouldn't have been the only alarm for such a valuable and irreplaceable repository of decades-long research. There should have been an alarm system that issues email alerts to a chain of individuals.
If that annoying beep was indeed an overtemp alarm, then damage was being done even before the janitor flipped the ill-fated switch, and nobody was around to act upon the alarm.
Depends on what it was
We used to have a cleaning crew that would unplug a network switch in a remote site to plug in the vacuum. It would go down every week around the same time and would come back up before we could dispatch. Took us a long while to figure out what was going on. Fortunately it was a redundant switch.
The beeping noise was the alarm and repairs had been scheduled for a few days later. Evidently the freezer was working well enough the samples weren't in danger. My guess is there was no one around because of covid work from home.
The beeping probably was an alarm of some kind. The janitor just began blindly throwing switches until the annoying beeps went away.
My refrigerator at home starts beeping if the door is left open for longer than 30 seconds. It's very annoying when I'm standing there with the door open, looking for something to graze on at 2 am...
Bingo! We have a winner! Alarms for a power failure are great. But $15 of hardware to prevent a foreseeable power failure, that had to be the first line of defense.
I have a cold temp alarm in my little apartment building for pipe freezing warning. How can the lab not have something?
Oh, no argument here. There definitely should have been a system to notify people not in the lab.
The beep might have been a reset alarm after a short power interruption, even if the freezer was working fine and hadn’t warmed significantly. I have a home CO detector that will beep loudly after a power outage until I reset it.
Was that in the article? This is FR; you’re not supposed to read the article before commenting.
Who knew Far Side was an instruction manual?
Re: No Alarms
Also, the switch had easy and unmarked access to people who had no idea what it did.
No plastic cover. No visual warnings.
I would vote NO money if I was on the jury.
The freezer contained cell cultures, samples and other research elements that were stored at minus-112 degrees Fahrenheit until September 2020, when an employee of Daigle Cleaning Services turned off a circuit breaker. That caused the temperature to rise to a relatively toasty minus-25.6 degrees Fahrenheit,
On Sept. 14, 2020, the freezer alarm went off when the temperature rose to minus-108.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Lakshmi, her faculty and students responded. Lakshmi “determined that the cell cultures, samples and research were not being harmed,” the lawsuit stated.
Lakshmi contacted the freezer manufacturer regarding emergency repairs, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, that work could not be done until Sept. 21, 2020. During that time, an alarm beep was sounding.
A sign in bold print in capital letters was posted on the freezer door: “THIS FREEZER IS BEEPING AS IT IS UNDER REPAIR. PLEASE DO NOT MOVE OR UNPLUG IT. NO CLEANING REQUIRED IN THIS AREA. YOU CAN PRESS THE ALARM/TEST MUTE BUTTON FOR 5-10 SECONDS IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO MUTE THE SOUND.”
The lawsuit states that on Sept. 17, 2020, a Daigle cleaner turned off the circuit breaker, which cut electricity to the freezer. When Lakshmi’s graduate research staff discovered the next day that the temperature had risen, they took steps to save the research materials.
First - no one thought to have the sign posted in multiple languages?
Half the kids at RPI are from overseas, English is the third or fourth language and most any of them could have posted a copy in whatever language they wanted.
There is even a thing called Google translate to help out ... or they could have pushed the button themselves!
Yes it was.
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