The Server Lived in the Broom Cupboard Next to the Mop

A Box That Hummed Behind the Brooms

When I joined the firm in 2011, the first thing Mr Steyn showed me after the kettle was the broom cupboard. Not because of the brooms. Because of the grey tower computer sitting on a plastic crate behind them, blinking a little green light, with a tangle of blue cables disappearing into a hole in the ceiling.

"That," he said, with the pride of a man showing you his first car, "is the server. My nephew set it up. Don't unplug it."

For twelve years I did not unplug it. I swept around it. I put a sign on the door that said DO NOT USE THIS PLUG FOR THE VACUUM after the cleaner, Mrs Mokoena, did exactly that one Monday in 2014 and the whole office lost its email for a day and a half. The nephew, Wikus, drove in from Kroonstad to fix it and told us all to stop panicking, and then left.

I am the office manager. In a firm of fourteen quantity surveyors, that means I do the payroll, order the toner, book the boardroom, remind people about their CPD points, keep the petty cash, and, as it turned out, become the person everyone shouts for when the internet does something strange. I have no training in computers. I have a diploma in office administration from a college in Welkom and a good memory for where things are.

The Tuesday the Light Went Red

The tender was for a hospital extension in the Northern Cape. Our team had been working on the bills of quantities for five weeks. It was the biggest submission the firm had attempted in years, and the portal closed at twelve noon on a Tuesday. Everyone had been in late the night before. There were pizza boxes in the boardroom.

At seven forty that morning, Annelie from the costing team came to my desk and said, very calmly, that she could not open the shared drive. At seven forty two, two more people said the same. By eight o'clock, nobody's email was arriving.

I went to the broom cupboard. The green light was red. The tower was making a clicking noise I had never heard before, like a clock with something stuck in it.

I phoned Wikus. Wikus, it turned out, was on holiday in Mauritius. He answered from a beach, I could hear the waves, and he talked me through restarting it while I knelt on the cupboard floor next to the mop bucket. It restarted. It clicked. The red light came back.

Four Hours and a Memory Stick

I will not describe the whole morning, because my blood pressure goes up when I do. But the short version is that our senior QS, Mr Pretorius, remembered that he had saved a copy of the main file on his own laptop on Sunday night. Annelie had a copy of two of the schedules on a memory stick in her handbag because she had worked on them at home. A junior had emailed one section to his personal Gmail out of what he called "paranoia" and what I now call wisdom.

We rebuilt the submission from those pieces. Mr Steyn stood in the boardroom doorway the whole time, very pale, not saying anything. At eleven fifty one, Mr Pretorius uploaded it. It went through. We all sat down wherever we happened to be standing, including me, on the floor of the passage.

We did not win the tender, in the end. But we submitted it, and the reason we submitted it was luck and three people's private habits, not any system we had.

The Conversation in Mr Steyn's Office

That Friday Mr Steyn called me into his office and closed the door, which he only does for salary reviews and deaths. He said he had been thinking about the broom cupboard. He said he was sixty four, that the firm was the only thing he had ever built, and that he had nearly lost a five week job because his nephew was on a beach.

He asked me to find out what other firms did.

I was flattered and terrified in equal amounts. I knew how to find a printer technician. I did not know what question to even ask about servers.

Learning a New Vocabulary in the Evenings

So I did what I always do, which is make a list and a lot of phone calls. I phoned the office managers at two engineering firms and an architect's practice I knew from the Bloemfontein business chamber breakfasts. All three said versions of the same thing. None of them had a box in a cupboard any more. They paid someone else to look after their computers, their backups, their security, all of it, every month, the way we pay someone to service the lift.

I learned that the phrase for that is an IT Managed Services Provider, and I learned it by saying it wrong several times at the breakfast. The architect's office manager, a very kind woman called Lerato, sat with me over a second cup of tea and explained how it worked in her office. Someone else watches the systems. Someone else does the updates. When something goes wrong, you phone a number and a person answers who is not on a beach.

She also said the server in the cupboard would probably have to go entirely. Their files, and their email, now lived in the cloud, which I had always imagined as something vague and floaty and which she described much more practically as "a proper building somewhere with air conditioning and guards, instead of our cupboard."

Moving Twelve Years of Drawings

I will not pretend I made the decisions. Mr Steyn and the two directors did, after I gathered quotes and sat through a lot of meetings where people used words I wrote down phonetically and looked up later.

What I did do was manage the move, which is what office managers do. The firm chose a company that offered Cloud Migration Services, and over about six weeks they moved twelve years of drawings, bills of quantities, correspondence and, I discovered, a great many photographs from staff braais, out of the broom cupboard and into somewhere more sensible. They did most of it over weekends so the surveyors did not lose working days. I came in on two Saturdays to let them in and make coffee, and I watched the progress bars more anxiously than I have watched anything since my daughter's matric results.

Our email moved too. We went onto Hosted Email Exchange, which as far as I understand it means our mail lives on someone else's properly looked after servers instead of ours. The practical difference for me was that on the Monday after the switch, Mr Pretorius opened his calendar on his phone at a site meeting in Bethlehem and it simply worked, and he phoned me to say so as if I had personally performed a miracle. I let him think that for about a day.

The Day We Emptied the Cupboard

The last part was the strangest. A technician came on a Thursday afternoon and switched off the grey tower for the final time. The green light went out. The office was very quiet for a second, as if we were all waiting for the email to stop, and it did not.

He unplugged the cables and carried the tower out to his car. Mrs Mokoena watched from the passage with her arms folded. When he had gone she went into the broom cupboard, looked at the empty plastic crate, and said, in Sesotho, something that I will translate politely as "finally, space for my buckets."

I took down my sign about the plug.

What I Do Now Instead

I am still the office manager. I still order the toner and chase the CPD points. But I am no longer the person who kneels on a cupboard floor next to a mop, phoning a man in Mauritius. When something breaks, I log a call, and somebody else worries about it.

Wikus came to the office year end function last December. He looked around, asked where his server had gone, and when I told him, he laughed and said he had been meaning to suggest that for years. I did not throw my drink at him. I am proud of that, too.