Story time: I got handed a ticket to go change a UPS in a “server room”.

I was in Fairbanks visiting family, I had some downtime, so I decided to do some “slumming” to break up the monotony and relive some of the good old days before I was more boardroom than server room.

Besides, a cool grand for what I figured was 2 hours work appealed to me on some “miss the struggles” level, and it was better than walking around the tourist traps or doing video calls at some depressingly fecund coffee shop.

So, I drive up in my borrowed SUV with peeling paint, grab my trusty tool bag I leave with family for adventures like this, and walk boldly through the doors of this apparently normal retail establishment, clipboard in hand. It was 2019, and the smell of denim and factory pressed shirts wafted through my sensorium as I walked through the awkwardly desynchronized automatic doors.

It was a perfectly normal, somewhat 90s nostalgic retail store.., but walking up the stairs (the elevator was out of service) to the second floor, I could just sense that something was a little off.

The office had a smell. I can’t say what it was, it was businesslike, and not unpleasant, but it spoke to me in an unknown language and I was at that moment curiously heartened that my contract was being paid by a 3rd party. It smelled of stagnant ideas, missed opportunities, and a fossilized board of directors.

I’m not just being colorful here in prose. All of these thoughts were projected into my forebrain by some lizard sense I had developed in 40 years of skulking the halls of enterprises large and small. I was involuntarily imagining a half used tin of bengay on the boardroom table, right by the shiny beige speakerphone with the long stroke buttons and the filthy woven grill.

Curious by now about the flood of intuitions, I treaded the slightly dingy burnt orange carpet tiles up to the POC office, checked in, and was shown the door tot the server room. Through there she said, gesturing at a plain flat golden pine door with the elbow thingy at the top. “Through there, straight through, the door at the back. You can’t miss it. I think it’s unlocked.”

Unconcerned with the casual lack of escort (pretty common really), I opened the door and was immediately transported to surreal alternative world. It was dark, there were tens of flickering screens across to the right and one half hanging, flashing fluorescent fixture dangling precariously from the uni-strut above. The suspended ceiling tiles were about 50 percent in attendance.

Fragments littered the floor, and the door closed behind me with a loud thump. for just a moment I was touched by a singular thought….. (run). I shook it off, by now, far too curious to turn back, come what may.

Briefly thinking of my heavy tool bag as a potential weapon, then realizing the ridiculousness of the notion, I let my eyes adjust as I took in the scene with what I confess could only be described as some kind of unhealthy delight.

This was a large room, easily 800 square feet, and a was clearly dedicated to loss prevention surveillance. There was an epic workstation with 2 giant flat screen plasma monitors front and center, and ten smaller monitors on either side. Most of them were dark, and most of the others were flickering with static.a singular monitor had a poor but recognizable image of a small nondescript room with a small desk and two metal chairs, one on each side of the desk in an overtly adversarial position. The image smelled of stale sweat and musty cardboard.

There was seating for two pilots at the helm of this derelict craft, replete with an impressive array of buttons, strange industrial joysticks, and an oddly out of place black dell workstation keyboard with the cord ripped in half. As I made my way up to admire the helm, I nearly tripped on an extension cord, only catching myself on a water filled trashcan with plastic sheeting aspiring to the heavens up through the dark abyss of the half-intact ceiling, which I only now noticed was comprised entirely (if sparsely) of black painted tiles.

Somehow this jolted me out of my entranced state, and I looked for the door I was supposed to find, quickly locating it towards the back of the room, just as I had been told.

Somehow it seemed like not an ordinary door now. It was with great anticipation and not a little trepidation that I examined the door. It was quite ordinary, really, and the knob was less dusty than it might have been. This was encouraging.

I tried the door, and it opened easily. Opened, that is, to a time 30 years in the past.

The buzzing fluorescent lamps were on and radiating furiously, instantly shattering the wreckage of the surveillance spaceship to smithereens. There was a gigantic, wheeled, beige machine in the middle of the room, about the size of an industrial floor scrubber. It hummed patiently, and featured a dim 10 inch green CRT, a beautifully sculpted beige keyboard, and a little less than a quarter inch of dust. I froze like a tourist gaping at a stegosaur’s nose, but quickly recovered my composure as I remembered I was here on purpose.

Conveniently, someone had swept a path through the center of the room, back to the newly installed floor rack with a couple of ciscos, a backup cellular telemetry box, and a pile of screws and a throwaway screwdriver scattered haphazardly on top of one of the routers.

The UPS I was to replace was actually pretty complex to configure, but I very carefully completed it in about 45 minutes including some firmware regressions to accommodate some nonstandard plugin the vendor installed. By very carefully I mean without stepping too hard on the floor, dropping any tools, and afraid to sneeze even though I was under intense respiratory assault from the unavoidable clouds of fine carpet dander that had accumulated on the linoleum tile over years of janitorial malfeasance.

I was terrified to make any sudden moves, because sitting on a stackable plastic chair next to the pliestocene PBX was a beige box. Its fans groaned with the wails of a thousand parched capacitors, and its hard drive made a crunchy rattling sound that seemed entirely improbable for a functioning device. Just visible under the dust on the front was a badge proudly displaying “pentium pro” and a giant cable was fed from the back of the artifact, like an implant from the borg, something I strangely remember as “IBM type 1” token ring wire, though I can’t be sure anymore that means anything at all.

At any rate, it was obvious that the entire on-prem server infrastructure was this ancient and faltering nightmare box, and I knew that a fly landing on it could bring it down. The easy money contract was starting to look like a setup.

With terror in my heart, I finished my work, carefully closed the door, and put as much distance between me and that roiling cauldron of liability as I could. I don’t even remember going back through the wrecked starship, just checking out, and thanking Voltaire that I made it out of there in time.

It now made abundant sense that the job had been left on the board for nearly a month and the contract had kept rising… god only knows how many sensible technicians had noped out of there before I was hypnotized into compliance by the sheer bizarre fascination of the thing.

Poking around afterward, I found that the box apparently was the server that ran the terminals in the tire service area. They also had that fat cable that looked more like waveguide than wire, and it must have been an absolute nightmare to install. It was definitely token ring, humming along in 2019.

Sears closed for good a few months later.

Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)