Cleaner accidentally ruins decades of research by turning off freezer

Looks like the researchers or the building managers didn't have enough precautions put in place to prevent something like this from happening.

I assume places like datacenters have power redundancy and have strict requirements to lock things like equipment cabinets and electrical cabinets where only specified contacts have keys and the ability to open them.

On the other hand, the cleaning company employee should have known not to touch anything that's not theirs to touch.

The researchers and the people who own the building should have done a better job of making sure "trying to help" doesn't cause decades of research to melt.

I guess Covid was a barrier to that, but _still_ - protect your research, why is that difficult?

“People’s behavior and negligence caused all this,” Michael Ginsberg, an attorney for RPI, told the Times Union. “Unfortunately, they wiped out 25 years of research.”

I agree. It was people's negligence: the researcher's. They weren't serious about protecting their stuff. They keept important samples in a broken freezer, without lab UPS equipment. They did not rush to get someone to repair the freezer immediately. Did not transfer to another freezer...did not have a backup freezer.

Blaming the janitor is the proffesional researcher equivalent of "the dog ate my homework".

Many of the readers will know of that event, narrated at least in "Absolute Zero Gravity", of the malfunctioning mainframe. One day, as a technician was making diagnostic about why the machine regularly crashed around that time, a janitor entered, saluted politely, unplugged the server, plugged a vacuum cleaner and went on with his routine.

Some of us have personally witnessed cleaning personnel torture equipment, ignoring with force and determination the signals that machines gave while violently stroking the area of the cables.

Oh, and this friend of mine, only days ago, found that a cleaning lady disconnected, to connect some appliance... an incubator. A whole aviary batch - all dead.

We always blame the little guy, but out there there's a manager (paid a lot more than the janitor for that very reason) happy that no one mentioned that they neglected to properly secure the valuable goods by anticipating that could happen.