A Little Story About Barbara Lenton (formerly Byro)
When Barb and I got married, she was able to work in the UK. So, the following working day she went down to the Labour Exchange and got permission to work documents and a National Insurance Number. Two days later she got a job as what was effectively a business continuity/disaster recovery person in the British branch of a large US company specialising in oil industry engineering.
Barb got her job for two reasons. Firstly, because of her achievement in getting one of the New York banks’ back-up servers up and working again within 48 hours after 9/11 had wiped the existing servers out. Secondly, one of the players of the Federation multi-player game worked for the company and recommended her after she moved all of Federation's servers across New York to a completely different data centre and had everything back up and running with only a half an hour break.
Anyway, among other things Barb started to organise some 'disasters' - mock of course! The first was a small affair involving a small explosion and a fire at one of the remote data centres in north-west London. Once the preparations for that were under way, Barb turned to a much more ambitious plan.
I need to explain the geography before I describe the new exercise. The company rented offices, etc. on a campus in south-west London. The campus was under one of the main flight paths for planes landing at Heathrow Airport, and running down the middle of the campus, next to the company, was a big wide concrete 'roadway'. Investigation turned up the fact that this was an emergency landing strip capable of handling a Boeing 747 Jumbo jet!
Well, you can imagine what came next with Barb's imagination!
What, she though, if a crippled Boeing 747 took out the top floor and then crashed out on the emergency runway? A tentative agreement was made with the company big boys in the USA.
OK, to business! Barb rang up the local emergency services to see if they would like to take part. The ambulance service almost bit her hand off - they would love to take part. The police were equally enthusiastic.
In the meantime, back at the office employees were queuing up to be marked on the schedule as being injured, needing to be bandaged when the time came to hold the exercise.
But first, there was the data centre explosion/fire version to run. Nothing like this had been tried before and, needless to say, a number of serious deficiencies were revealed. Over the next few weeks the problems were analysed by Barb and her boss and new procedures were put in place to handle this sort of problem.
At the wrap up meeting there was general agreement that the exercise had been useful, but as one of the (male) participates put it, "Very good, but of course it's not something that will happen in real life."
As he was talking, the phone rang and Barb's boss picked it up. "Yes," he said, "I'll see to it immediately." He put the phone down, and looked around the table. "There's been an explosion and there is a fire in the Greenford Data Centre," he announced...
Everybody looked at Barb! "Get moving!" was all she said.
The Greenford fire was, of course dealt with in double quick time. But the US management were obviously a superstitious lot because they vetoed the 747 exercise after hearing about the Greenford fire...
Barb left soon after due to health problems, but right up until recently we were still getting companies, government bodies, and the like trying to persuade her to work for them - including free limos to and from work and exotic wheelchairs that would enable her to traverse data centres. Sadly, she wasn't able to accept any of these offers because of her illness.
Barbara Lenton 1950-2022
Written by Alan Lenton
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