monkeymom's Diaryland Diary
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In which there is not really a ghost in the server room.
Something very weird just happened to me, and I would not be writing about it here, except that I called Rachel right afterward, and she told me to write it in my journal because Kim would enjoy it.
You know I spend most of the night at my job just reading and knitting, unless it's an unusually busy night on the switchboard, but I do have some actual work I do - at the beginning of the night I print out the daily lab reports, and I also do the dayend closing of the financial reports. I don't do anything technical or any kind of accounting, because all of those reports are automated, and I just run the end of day closing routines on the computer and upload the reports for the people who actually need to see them the next day.
The other thing I do is toward the end of the night. I change the tapes in the server room, which involves taking the previous day's tapes out of the machines and putting in fresh tapes for the current day. The tapes record everything that has been entered into the hospital's computer system during the day and we save the previous day's tapes in a fireproof safe until they are replaced by the next day's tapes. The used tapes go back into the storage drawers to be used again. They aren't saved forever, we just always have the previous day's data backed up.
So my job is to go into the server room after 4:30 a.m. every morning and change the backup tapes. The server room is just a room full of racks of servers, which look like big tape players, or cd players, depending on what kind of media the information is recorded on in each server. It's kept cold by two big air conditioning units and there are big floor fans, to keep the cold air circulating. The servers give off a lot of heat, and the air conditioners and fans run constantly to keep the temperature down to protect the servers from overheating.
Just inside the door, against the wall, is a storage cabinet that is about waist-high to me, with three deep drawers full of tapes. That is where the tapes are stored, when they are not in use or in the safe, and I get the fresh tapes out of the drawers and carry them to the machines to replace the used tapes.
So today at 5:00, Bill from housekeeping came in to give me a bathroom break, because I can't leave the office unless there is someone here to watch the alarms, so one of the housekeepers gives me a break three times a night. When I take my break at 5, I change the tapes.
I took yesterday's tapes out of the safe and carried them into the server room with me, and the door closed and locked behind me. As I was leaning forward to put the tapes back in the drawer, I saw a man out of the corner of my eye! He was standing next to me, wearing dark pants and a light colored shirt with thin dark vertical stripes. I was startled and turned to look at him, thinking for a second that it was Bill, because the man was about the same size, but of course it wasn't Bill, and there was no one there.
There is a rack above the cabinet that is made of metal tubes, and because it is cold in the server room, there is a dark green lab coat hanging from that rack, and it was blowing in the breeze from the fans, so that must have been what I thought I saw, but I sure had a vivid impression of a man standing there!
I could not get that image out of my head as I took the tapes to the other end of the room to change them, and I kept turning around to look at that area, but I didn't see anything there. I did think I saw something out of the corner of my eye again while I was stacking the tapes I took out of the machines, but I'm sure it was just because I was jumpy.
When I was done in the server room, I locked up the tapes in the safe and came back to my office, where Bill was sitting and reading the paper. I told him that something creepy had happened, and described what I thought I had seen for just that split second. Bill offered to go look in the server room, but I told him I knew there was nothing there, it was just an odd impression I had.
So there it is, that's what happened to me tonight, and it was really nothing at all, just a shadow of a lab coat blowing in the breeze from a fan, but it was very real for a second.
Kim loves ghostly happenings and she always watches shows about ghost hunters on TV, so this story is for her.
5:28 a.m. - 2009-01-14
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