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Comment by viccis | Hacker News Reader

>But... data centre work is horrid, dirty, hot, and underpaid for what it is

You left out "loud" haha. Just the nonstop buzz; it's like you're working at an airport tarmac or something.

I had to go to another data centre just outside London about 10 years ago with a colleague who had never been inside one - we had some colocation kit hosted there and were going to spend most of a day swapping some cards and checking things through the KVM. He looked at me really weirdly when I offered him ear defenders on the way there. He wasn't ready for the sensory overload - the noise, the heat, the movement of air, the artificial light, the slightly weird smell, it was all a lot. 3 hours in, he wanted out. Couldn't blame him, I wasn't far off myself.

Adjacent, I work in a lab so we have dozens of ovens and freezers running constantly, so I'm intimately familiar with the constant hum, even though my office is a couple of doors away from the oven room.

We had a full site shutdown last week, which involved all power being shut off, which meant no running ovens.

The lack of sound felt so strange, like I was somewhere I shouldn't be, or in some sort of liminal space. It was unsettling in the silliest way.

The empty is what I call it. It's not a buzz in your ears, it permeates your entire body. And when it stops it's like part of you is missing.

Which is really odd, because just leaving the building doesn't have the same effect.

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