I couldn't have made this up ...

There are some days in life when you just believe with every cell in your body that Jeremy Beadle is going to jump out from around a corner at any moment and say those imortal words, "You've Been Framed!" Of course, it starts like that, but when he doesn't appear, you start to get paranoid and start looking for hidden microphones in your coffee cup and in the microwave. Today was one of those days.

I got the search logs from my ISP and couldn't believe my eyes when someone came to my sites after asking ...

• Is it alright to have sex underwater

They did it using ask.com and I can confirm that whois told me that it was an AT&T customer in Columbia, Missouri in the U.S.A. Well, ten out of ten for imagination!

Of course, that was just the start of the amazing day at work. You see, the power outage that affected the servers yesterday, decided to affect the security systems today. The server room was annoyingly locked out, and it has been the focus of alarm engineers attention for most of the day. Fortunately, the outer doors have been working fine all day.

However, we were locked out of the server room for some hours in the morning so were unable to get to anything. This was a commedy of errors that was only topped by the fact that in the course of the day, during investigations, the service engineer failed to check the room properly before locking the door and automatically arming the alarm systems, and then the door refused to let him unlock it; thus treating my colleagues to a hysterical vision of my face in the grated security window, mouthing, "Let me out!"

The situation worsened when the security engineer finally told me to use the emergency door release, and after smashing the plastic sheet it singularily failed to release the door. Insult was added to injury when one colleague placed a sign saying "Stay Still" against the window as there are a number of different sensor systems in the room that are rigged straight to the Police station. Although I did my best to stay totally still, I watched in horror as the various systems detected my presence at the same time. There was I, stuck in the room with no apparent means of escape, envisiging the onslaught of blues and twos to our current location. The other issue that was on my mind was that the room is cooled by three dedicated air conditioning units that turn the server in to a very nice habitat for penguins, but not a very human friendly environment. I had visions of getting frostbite, and dying of hyperthermia before they could get me out; the Police being treated to another of, "Well, now I've seen it all," type of stories.

The blues and two's, however, failed to appear due to the fact that the door locking mechanism and the emergency door release weren't the only things that weren't functioning; the security system was also dead. It took the, now very worried, security engineer returning to the control room and releasing the door from there before I was set free, emerging to much amused colleagues.

As the working day unfolded, I then began to wish that I had been stuck in the server room for the rest of the day. I brought a users PC back to the lab to rebuild it, and on hooking it up, the thing was dead. Although I'm a hardware engineer, there is only so far I can go without violating our service support contract, so I had to eventually call the company who got an engineer in.

He walked up to the unit, flicked the power switch and the unit flew in to life. I suddenly felt compelled to whack my head against the wall several times, but the engineer, who is a regular on our site, knew that I wasn't a lunatic, and investigated further. Fortunately, the processor socket needed cleaning, and that is all it was.

I felt a great relief that I wasn't going mad; or rather, to quallify that, madder than is the statutory requirement to be part of an I.T. team.