While working at Kew, I occasionally have to go to the more remote parts of the site and work on a server whose Remote Desktop has failed. This morning we thought we'd pull out an old server so I took an assistant (we'll call him "Aaron") and as the distance was around a mile or so, we also borrowed one of the golf buggies available for long distance fetching and carrying.
On the way back, it was still early and therefore dark; but this morning it was also very foggy and the usual landmarks we use to navigate the gardens were invisible. We took our minds off the fact that we'd been going round in circles for 20 minutes by singing the 'A-Team' theme tune and pretending that we were doing 60 across the grass with M16's blazing and a roof mounted home-made cannon spitting non-lethal fire in every direction.
Aaron had the old server resting on his knees and all seemed fine until I took a wrong turn and had to do an "emergency" U-turn (sans hand-brake). I say emergency as these buggies are limited to only about 8MPH. However, the effect was almost the same.
Aaron (lulled into a false sense of security by the low speed and fantasies of being 'Hannibal' or the 'Face man') wasn't holding on too well, to the buggy or the server and as I turned sharply he made a sort of strangled "eerrkk" noise, scrabbled to hold onto to something, and very (very) nearly rolled out of the buggy, down the bank and into the lake. Along with our server.
See, it's possible to get into trouble with even the most innocuous vehicles these days!
Update: I entered this story into an IT story competition run by Microsoft and won 2 copies of the new Windows Resource Kit, one of which will of course go to "Aaron".
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