Smoke! Smoke! Smoke!
Roughly 10% of my job at Fractured Atlas is straight-up IT support. I help the members of our staff keep their computers running. My purview includes two dozen or so PCs running Windows, Ubuntu and OSX, two local servers, a couple of EC2 instances, two printers and a very small rack of networking gear. Fairly or not, I like to think of myself as pretty computer-savvy. I solve problems [theme music].
So it was pretty embarrassing when I dropped the paper clip in the surge protector the other day. Sparks, smoke and a blown breaker. One dead CPU power supply. Two singed AC cables. One power strip I’m not plugging in again. All in the trash. Total loss: ~$200.
Idiot. Why where you futzing with a paper clip around live power? I wasn’t. It fell off a shelf while I was moving things around and landed miraculously. (What’s the opposite of a miracle?)
Idiot. Why didn’t you have the open outlets covered? I did. With electrical tape. The paper clip bridged the fins on two plugs that had jimmied themselves up a couple of millimeters over time.
I knew that surge protector was under a place I had paper clips (and staples and thumbtacks and pencil lead) and I was confident I’d arranged things so something like this would never happen.
That shelf is much neater than the server room at Fractured Atlas (ATHENA first, then organizing). If this had happened here and if the piece of equipment have been our fancy network switch, I would have done ~$2000 damage and taken the office offline for at least as long as it took me to get the power back on and our backup working.
And that server room is far, far tidier than some of the light booths (nooks?) I’ve worked in. If I had done this with, say, a fancy ETC Express light board, we’d be talking $5000+ and a performance under work lights.
Why does this matter?
Well, I don’t have $5000 lying around. $200 is about the limit where I can write something off as “character building”. I cross my tees and dot my eyes and pay attention and things like this still happen from time-to-time.
Stuff will break. It will be your fault. It will be your fault despite your best intentions. If it isn’t your fault, it will still be your fault, because you were responsible for the stuff that broke.
If you can’t afford to replace it, you need to insure it. Talk to your broker. If you don’t have one, check out our insurance pocket guides and then talk to Emily in our insurance program.
Tags: disaster, liability insurance, technology
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best insurance pitch ever. thanks Justin for the reminder both to be careful (i am supposed to keep paperclips away from plugs?) and to CYA.