nearly electrocuted

On wednesday, I was tasked with installing some servers at our hosting site in indianapolis. this is a pretty routine task, however this time we had a new model of server that so happened to come with rails that were longer than previous models. further complicating matters is that the racks at this data center are not deep at all and so happen to have very thich rear-mounted vertically aligned power strips. Not paying any attention at all to this, as i was struggling with trying to get this rail kit installed for one of the servers, it so happened to wedge its rear metal hook between a plug's conductor blade and the power strip. I didn't notice this until after i mentioned to the lady from the contracting firm from whom we buy the rack space and said "i feel juice".

i don't think she quite understood what i was trying to say, and as i stepped away, the rail tipped down a bit in front and sparks flew from the area where i was holding the rail. it was quite a light show i tell you. needless to say, it tripped the breaker on the power strip (mind you, this is a large 20A strip meant to power half of an entire computer rack). fortunately though we have alot of redundant equipment with redundant power supplies plugged into different circuits. so, none of our website or site-to-site WAN links went down. this certainly was a helluva way to QA our redundancy, but in the end management was pleased that our past planning paid off.

now, why didn't i get fully electrocuted? well, i believe that the electricity never left my hand as i was wearing rubber soled shoes and the floor in there is an insulator. I was touching this rail with my left hand, and if i would have contacted metal elsewhere to complete the circuit like a foot or my right hand, the current likely would have coursed through my heart and i likely could have died.

ultimately, we did get the servers installed, but unable to put them in the nice rails, we had to set them on a shelf at the bottom of the rack, which will make future maintenance on those boxen a pain in the arse, but was necessary.

yargh.