From Charles Anderson
by e-mail
I am glad to hear that the story was an urban myth. I found it hard to
believe, as it sounded very much like an incident that happened with my last
employers, Spectra-Tek UK Ltd, of Malton, North Yorkshire.
About 1990 we installed an automation system at a Shell France site near
Paris. Then the Shell staff complained that the system was shutting down every
day at 5 in the afternoon. The fault was eventually traced to the cleaner who
came in at that time and plugged in his vacuum cleaner.
In a variation to your story, he didn’t disconnect our computer, but the
extra load on the mains was enough to convince our system that a power failure
was in progress, so it shut itself down to preserve data integrity.
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I don’t know if this is the origin of the hospital bed story, but we did
install a similar automation system at the Caltex Milnerton oil depot near Cape
Town a year or two earlier, and it’s possible that one of our engineers passed
the story on to the Caltex staff during a maintenance visit.
