Neil Harvey wrote:
>
> This is an interesting phenomenon that I have witnessed several times
> over the years.  In South Africa, we have an old system of telephone
> jacks, not rj-type, although that is happening with new installations,
> but fairly large male and wall mounted female sockets.

I've probably told this one before, so old-timers on the list forgive
me.  I've had TWO past experiences with higher-order animal species.

Our machine room is actually a converted basement, the building sits on
a hill such that the 1st floor (where we are) opens to the main street
in front, but the 2nd floor opens to the secondary street above at the
opposite end of the building.  The machine room is in the "underground"
end at the far end of the building, we have no windows, the "steam
tunnel" door is on one side of the room, and when I first started
working there it had one of those Civil Defence Fallout Shelter signs on
it because of the underground nature and layers of concrete/steel.
Anyway...

One of the outer offices (call it "downhill" from the machine room
relative to the ground level) has a suspended ceiling, above which is an
access to the outside (ground level) where several conduits and so forth
enter our building, including old serial cables we ran to the adjacent
building.  It had a relatively insecure "grate" on the outside and was
rather small.

What this leads to is that one evening (OK, I'll make it shorter) the
night operator called to say that there was a possum (for the
politically correct, an 'opossum') in the machine room.  The critter had
gotten through the grate, dropped through a ceiling tile in the machine
room, apparently attracted by the light (we had a tile removed where the
cables came to the HP3000s).  It was casually strolling around until she
screamed, then it ran for a floor cutout and crawled beneath the raised
floor.  It took facilities crew and the Humane Society a few hours to
coax it out :-)

Several years later, a female possum (the first was a male) pulled the
same stunt except dropped into the supply room nearest the grate,
complete with a litter of four.

No hardware damage, but we loose so many good night operators that way
that we're looking at a lights-out operation :-)

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>