Freezer disaster brings back memories of messing up the DR phone system

One of the biggest oversteps of my career at the Daily Republic resulted in me arriving at work the following day to see a phone company truck parked near the front door, a worker tinkering with the switchboard and the switchboard operator giving me a stink eye.

I had broken the phone system and they knew it was me. Yikes.

Decades later, I realize it could have been worse. I could have been the guy at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, back in 2020.

You may not know the story, but it makes my overstep seem mild.

Back in 2020, the folks at RPI were doing "groundbreaking" research on photosynthesis that would assist in solar panel development. The work was expensive and elaborate, but there was a problem. The research samples were intended to be stored at more than 100 degrees below zero, but the freezer had problems. Since this happened during during the pandemic, there was a delay for repairs, so RPI workers did everything they could to keep the freezer as cold as possible and put up a sign that said to leave it alone, even if the alarm was going off. In other words, don't open the freezer, just hold down a button to turn off the alarm.

Well, the alarm went off. It was irritating. It kept going, so a contract nighttime cleaner solved the problem.

He threw the breaker switch to turn off the entire thing, then went back to cleaning. Blessed silence!

Well . . . maybe not blessed.

By the time the RPI folks realized what happened, the temperature in the freezer had risen enough to spoil the samples. About $1 million worth of work and decades of research went down the drain.

Imagine his feeling when he came to work and saw researchers pulling out their hair, wondering what happened, while he knew there was video surveillance.

That's worse than my experience.

Back in the day, I merely liked sneaking onto the newspaper's overarching phone system and making announcements to the entire building in the hours after most workers had gone home. Mostly just the newsroom and the press workers were there, so I'd sing, I'd pretend to be a stadium announcer, I'd tell people to call their mothers.

There was no purpose to it, which is why it was slightly horrifying when I came to the office on a Wednesday morning to see all the hubbub, having messed around Tuesday night on the system. Donna, the beloved switchboard operator who was always nice, just looked at me and said, "Don't ever do this again." She wasn't smiling.

I didn't. And I never really got in trouble. I don't even know if the bosses knew it was me (Donna, of course, had innocently shown me how to do it when I asked her weeks earlier), although my role in such activities as chair racing and what we called "border-tape golf" made me a prime suspect.

Unlike the guy at RPI, I didn't cost the newspaper millions of dollars (hundreds of dollars? Maybe). I didn't have the media covering me. There was no lawsuit (unlike RPI).

The closest I got to payback was months later when someone had snuck a series of CDs onto a building-wide music system they had installed. I came in another morning and found the CDs on my desk, broken, with a note to stay out of the CD system.

I hadn't done it. But it seemed fair since I'd gotten away with the PA system shenanigans.

But let the record state: I think it was co-worker Matt Peiken who did it, not me.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.